Lai Cheong Brown

Lai Cheong Brown is a North Melbourne heritage, architecture and interior design practice working across heritage conservation, adaptive re-use and new architecture. Established in 2011, it takes "an intentional and respectful approach to integrating the old with the new", aiming for graceful, rigorously detailed architecture that is deeply considered and enduring.

The practice deliberately keeps its team small and its portfolio focused, so it can be closely involved in every stage of design, documentation and delivery. Its team draws on decades of collective experience with major practices such as Lovell Chen and Bates Smart, with a key focus on new architecture within heritage overlays and places on the Victorian Heritage Register. Founding partner Rowan Brown brings more than 20 years' experience in architecture and heritage.

On Lunchbox, New Farmhouse French Island is an off-grid, prefabricated farmhouse whose modules were barged to a windswept site with no services in Western Port Bay. Clerestory House reimagines a heritage inter-war home for a multi-generational family, centred on a timber-lined clerestory.

See New Farmhouse French Island and Clerestory House on Lunchbox below.

This Off-Grid Prefab House Is Perfect for Beautiful but Isolated Site

To construct this off-grid home on Victoria's French Island, prefabricated modules had to be transported by barge to the isolated site.

A Stunning Timber Lined Clerestory is the Centrepiece of This Reno

This renovated interwar house is now perfect home for a retired couple and adult family member plus a meeting place for nearby family.