A groundbreaking housing project in Sydney, Australia, is revolutionizing mental health care by combining innovative architecture with a compassionate approach to treating homeless individuals with acute mental illness. The Habilis project, designed by Collins and Turner architects, represents both exceptional architectural achievement and a compelling solution to pressing social challenges.
Professor Olav Nielssen, the practicing psychiatrist who initiated the project, describes it as having built a "Potemkin Village" where everyone who experiences the facility recognizes its positive impact. This reference to the historical tale of Empress Catherine II's 1787 journey along the Dnieper River to visit newly annexed Crimea highlights how architecture's perceived value can be as important as its functional aspects. In the original story, Field Marshal Grigory Potemkin allegedly created attractive stage-set facades populated with cheerfully dressed people to hide the war-torn countryside, quickly dismantling and rebuilding them as the royal entourage passed.
Habilis serves as both the name of an initiative developing long-term housing for homeless people with severe mental illness and the first development built under this program. Located in Summer Hill and launched in late 2019 with the purchase of a former industrial site, the project was made possible through private philanthropy and New South Wales government funding. The site faces Parramatta Road, Sydney's busy east-west arterial route, with low-scale warehouses and standalone homes to the south and a long eastern frontage along Hawthorne Canal.
The project's underlying philosophy traces back to the revolutionary 1978 shift in mental health treatment that occurred in Trieste, Italy. A radical law closed psychiatric hospitals one day only to reopen them the next as community housing, sparking an international deinstitutionalization movement. This approach emphasized treating the whole person rather than focusing solely on the illness in isolation. The movement has influenced local mental health policy since the NSW government's 1983 Richmond Report, leading to the establishment of both temporary and long-term accommodation in small, shared-room boarding houses scattered throughout typical suburban neighborhoods.
Through years of working in these environments, Professor Nielssen developed ideas for collective housing that inform the Habilis model. The facility features 21 serviced apartments for individual residents across two levels within a secure perimeter, along with dedicated clinical and communal spaces. This housing density makes it viable to support the facility with a live-in caretaker and an on-site mental health social worker, with regular visits from a nurse practitioner and psychiatrist.
Commissioned in 2020, Collins and Turner created an elegant transformation that worked with the site's existing spatial relationships to retain and reuse the original furniture showroom and warehouse buildings. The street-facing entrance facade remains largely blank but features an appealing composition of material textures. The design demonstrates remarkable economy in detailing, with skillful architecture confidently deployed using green custom-orb roofing, fine horizontal datum flashings, and cladding that references the original warehouse's green roof.
The vehicle entrance features clever detailing with a large sliding gate made of vertical steel palisade tubing. The pedestrian entrance integrates well within the larger facade design, providing a carefully calibrated screen that defines enclosure while allowing ground-floor communal spaces and the public street to enliven each other. The 21 dwellings are built to the Liveable Housing Design Standard and arranged in a canted, L-shaped plan.
Ground-floor apartments are accessed through garden thresholds from the front, similar to terrace housing design. The upper-level perimeter circulation path travels seamlessly from outside to inside without discernible thresholds, widening to small communal terraces that overlook the canal and provide opportunities for informal interactions crucial to building community. The ground-floor open space consists of two distinct areas: one centered around a small communal table and barbecue in emerging gardens designed by Gallagher Studio, and another in the undercroft parking area with a large vehicle turning circle and two exposed car stackers.
During a site visit, the project's human impact becomes evident through residents like Luke, who shares his story of homelessness and explains how he strategically accesses neighborhood support networks including the local gym, Centrelink, and subsidized groceries. His upper-floor dwelling, closest to the canal and farthest from the road, provides a quiet, compact space with a small kitchen, new cutlery and dishes, and room for his lounge, large television, and drum kit. The space captures the essence of domestic life and serves as a genuine haven.
Despite challenges from COVID-era design and construction processes, the project includes numerous thoughtful details. The height of the simple fiber-cement-clad threshold ledge at each garden apartment interface with landscaped communal spaces exemplifies this attention to detail. When seated, it offers a private space with views to the riverside canopy and sky beyond, but when standing, it becomes a perfectly calibrated place to lean and chat with passersby.
However, the project also reveals regulatory constraints, such as an unfortunately excessive one-meter stair width that impacts the narrow living areas in otherwise excellent two-story dwellings. Different operational funding mechanisms required strict compliance with the Liveable Housing Design Standard, including overly wide minimum stair widths. Hopefully, amendments to this standard will enable performance solutions allowing skilled architects to calibrate more appropriate outcomes.
The facility's common area features large cupboards filled with crockery, board games, bedding, and other domestic essentials collected from friends of the facility and ready for new residents. These everyday objects represent the physical manifestation of care and demonstrate that this "Potemkin Village" is not a false facade but rather a promise fulfilled. The project successfully demonstrates architecture's capacity to project values, signal intent, and create spaces that truly deinstitutionalize psychiatric care while maintaining dignity and promoting healing.
