'We’d always dreamed of an apartment in the city': The downsizers enjoying Melbourne's CBD

After their children moved out, Mish Wright and her husband Mark Perry lived in a five-bedroom home that no longer had much of a purpose.

“Every day I’d get up and go downstairs, open up all the curtains and the windows, and then in the night go around the house, close it all up,” Wright says. “I’ve never seen the point of having a large house for the sake of having a large house.”

The couple raised their children in Pascoe Vale South, in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, but fancied the idea of moving into an abode for two with restaurants and live music within walking distance.

“We’d always dreamed of having an apartment in the city,” Wright says.

Yet ‘where to next?’ wasn’t an easy question to answer. For five years, on and off, the couple looked at apartments in Melbourne’s CBD and various inner-city areas “just to see what we liked and what we didn’t like … going to see lots of apartments means you quickly work out what you don’t like”.

In 2020, they struck gold and bought an apartment off the plan in a Brunswick development designed around eco-friendly principles, something Wright says aligned with their own views. “We have strong values around the environment and treading on the earth as lightly as possible.”

Now, more than a year into their new life in their two-bedroom, two-bathroom home on the third floor, it’s proven the right choice. “It’s beautiful,” Wright says. “It’s got recycled floorboards, roughcast concrete ceilings, all brass fittings … I really love the design.”

They converted the second bedroom into an office where Wright, an education writer and Perry, who works in fintech, work from home.

Having left behind a large home where “everything was big”, the couple chose a minimalist interior accentuated with art from Australian and New Zealand artists, and have embraced being surrounded by less.

“We’ve kept it all very minimal – even if I buy something new, I take something else out,” Wright says. “When you do that, you think about things when you buy them – is this just en route to the bin, and how do I feel about that?”

The apartment building, a collaboration between Milieu Property, DKO Architecture and Breathe Architecture, features carefully chosen materials, optimal orientation and solar energy in a commitment to sustainability that Wright says is a nice change from what they were used to. “Our power bill is around $35 per month. Can you believe that?”

There’s a rooftop veggie garden, communal laundry with a covered clotheslines (“a luxury to not dry your clothes in your apartment,” Wright says) and friendly design elements like a welcoming internal atrium.

Wright wasn’t kidding about wanting to live in a more green way – one of her favourite things about the building is the “truly amazing” communal rubbish room that helps keep things out of landfill.

“Rubbish that I throw out is minimal. We recycle everything from the elastic bands that go around the vegetables to pill packets,” she says. “I know that might not seem exciting to others, but it’s part of our values in the building.”

There’s “a real sense of community” there, home to a mix of people “from all ages and stages of life, young single people to young families to people who say they’re going to be going out in a box”.

Friends outside the building sometimes question the wisdom of buying an apartment instead of a standalone home. Wright finds the best way to convey what it’s like to be part of a “really beautiful community” is to describe how the neighbours all connect with each other on Slack, the online communication platform, to share book recommendations, escapades of resident pets (Wright and Perry own two cats, Sugar and Olive), and the baking efforts of the cooks amongst them, “where you can take a photo and share your cooking – and whether or not you’ve got any leftover”.

Though the apartment is only about five kilometres from their old home in Pascoe Vale South, Wright now has the walkable neighbourhood she’d always hoped for. It’s a short stroll to catch live music at The Jazzlab, and a favourite hangout for the couple is the classical music venue Tempo Rubato, which is a one-minute walk away and, delightfully, sends classical music through their apartment’s open windows.

Brunswick Market, which is so close they can see it from home, and organic suppliers Terra Madre are where the couple goes for fresh ingredients. “I have a cane basket and I pop around to the stores,” Wright says. “I love that my exercise is walking around my community.”

Other favourite places to stock up are the beloved local Ovens Street Bakery and Pasta PiCi’s handmade gluten-free pasta. Sydney Road is the local major shopping strip, renowned for its multicultural restaurants and cafes but there’s also excellent food to be had within the building itself. “They have live music down at the bottom of our building, and we have a South American restaurant – and they do room service.”

Most delicious of all for Wright might be the renewed sense of belonging that this chapter of life has allowed. “I’ve lived in a few cities around the world, and you find your niche in every city. And I fit in Brunswick.”