A dining room under a ceiling of angled timber battens with a skylight, and glass doors to a garden.

Ripple House

Melbourne

Ripple House is FMD Architects' renovation and extension of a single-fronted Victorian house in Melbourne, completed in 2020 for a couple and their dogs, with two bedrooms and a home office. The practice puts it in a sentence: "The Ripple House is a series of unfurling spaces defined by subtle shifts in the site and light." The old rooms keep their sequence, and at the threshold to the new part the floor steps from timber to concrete with heating run through it, under a lowered ceiling painted a deep green, before the extension opens up beneath a rippling ceiling of silvertop ash battens: folded to catch the northern light above the neighbouring brick wall, raking low along the southern boundary so the neighbours keep the same light, and anchored by a triangular skylight that draws in the morning. Fiona Dunin, the practice's founder, on where the idea came from: "We studied artists such as Jim Lambie in an attempt to understand how to best express these notions," and on building it: "All those triangular forms meant there was no room for error, and Ben from BFC Built rose to the challenge!"

The card is the first frame of the post it was seen through, photographed by Peter Bennetts: the timber dining table and its wishbone chairs under the battened ceiling, the triangular skylight cut into it overhead, full-height timber-framed glass doors to a garden of climbers against the neighbour's brick wall, and on the right the fluted timber island of the kitchen with a sculpted figure perched on its end.

FMD Architects

FMD Architects is an architecture practice founded by Fiona Dunin in 2005, based in Melbourne and Tasmania. Its CLT House is also in this library.

fmdarchitects.com.au · Instagram

Architecture and interiors FMD Architects (@fmdarchitects). Photography Peter Bennetts (@peterbbennetts). Builder BFC Built (@bfcbuilt). Seen via @co_architecture_au.

The picture comes from this post on Instagram.

Researched September 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.