Description

Montsalvat is an artists' colony in Eltham. Established by Justus Jorgensen in 1934, the colony is set among gardens on five hectares of land, and is home to dozens of buildings, including houses, halls, studios, galleries and stables.

Brougham Street Cohousing is situated on a 7000-square-metre block near Diamond Creek. A resident-led community building, it features a heritage-listed mudbrick studio and shed built by Peter Garner who worked on Montsalvat as a builder.

What's On

This event will re-discover the parallels between the creation of Montsalvat’s artist community in the 1920s and the creation of Brougham Street Cohousing resident community in the 2020s.

Connecting the two proximate properties is nearly a century of grassroots building projects to create community-first places. There are also connections between Peter Garner, a mudbrick building specialist who helped build Montsalvat and who also built a studio and shed on the site of Brougham St, which is now the central focus of the communal buildings and gardens for the Brougham St Cohousing community. 

There will be tours at both Montsalvat and Brougham St on Sunday. At Montsalvat, director Raphael Kilpatrick will give attendees a tour and talk explaining the origin story of Montsalvat, its spirit of community-led development and its connections to architect Alistair Knox.

At Brougham Street Cohousing, there will be tours of the Peter Garner studio and shed. Members of the collective and Tim Riley, director of Property Collectives, will talk about how the members' values and principles informed the participatory co-design process for designing the cohousing project.

In Collaboration With:

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  Property Collectives

  Property Collectives are developers and advisors who focus on projects with purpose and impact. Our advisory co-operative brings together the collective intelligence of investment, development, project and asset management experts, and our building group model empowers people to take more control over their housing by co-developing the homes and communities they want.

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  Tim Riley

  Tim Riley is the founder of Property Collectives. The leading deliberative development group in Australia, their building group model empowers people to co-develop the new homes and communities they want, giving citizens more control over the location, design and quality of their future homes.

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  Raphael Kilpatrick

  Raphael Kilpatrick is currently a PhD Candidate at RMIT School of Architecture and Urban Design and holds a Masters in Disaster, Design and Development. Raph is co-founder of The Social Studio and a current Director at Montsalvat. He has contributed to several international think tanks, including the Making Futures School (Berlin).