Dark rain clouds hover overhead and a brisk wind blows around the old brick buildings clustered on the top of Jacksons Hill on Melbourne’s outskirts.
The former Female Refractory Ward at the Sunbury Lunatic Asylum once housed 50 women in tiny cells, some of them padded, but it has since been transformed into a community arts precinct that has been awarded Victoria’s top award for heritage architecture.
The Sunbury Community Arts and Cultural Precinct, by Architecture Associates with Openwork, won the John George Knight Award for Heritage at the Australian Institute of Architects’ 2026 Victorian Architecture Awards on Friday night
The precinct’s project manager, Carina Doolan, said that from 1890, women who suffered from things such as postnatal depression and menopause, those who were neurodivergent, “irrational, outspoken women”, or women who wanted to be independent and not get married and have children were sent to the asylum.
“If they fought back and felt that they were being unjustly put into an asylum, sometimes they would act out and be seen as not conforming, so then they would be moved into here,” she said. “There was no power, no toilets in the cells. It was very cold, little light, no heating. There was a bathroom with five baths and women were washed in the icy cold waters.”
Doolan said Architecture Associates and Openwork had a challenging brief to transform a building that had such a traumatic history.
“The building was built to confine people and to keep people away from society, and it was very closed off and very isolated, very cold, very restrictive,” she said. “The challenge for us was to make this beautiful community space that is vibrant and enjoyable; so, trying to change the view without losing the history.”
Architects Samuel Hunter and Danielle Peck carefully retained many of the original features of the building such as the heavy metal cell doors and the wrought-iron fencing around the “airing yard” where the women could go outside, while creating space for a theatre, art gallery, pottery studio and woodwork room.
“It’s got this tremendously dark, mysterious, troubling past, which is now the positive message is it’s a community project all of a sudden and supporting creative arts in the community outside of metropolitan Melbourne,” Hunter said. “Where the arts are supported beyond the metropolis, that’s very uncommon.”
Oversized planters in the courtyard echo the chimneys around the site and the architects have tried to insert a sense of fun with tool motifs in the woodwork studio taking some “big Bunnings” inspiration.
“It just has such a serious weight when you come here that finding moments for a bit of levity is important,” Hunter said.
Community involvement included the woodwork group creating columns for the new building and the potters creating handmade tiles.
“We didn’t really stop designing until the construction was complete because every week there would be a new revelation,” Hunter said. “There would be a new door, a new step, or we discovered all the original blue stone flooring in what was the bath house.”
Peck said it was refreshing to have a client who did not want to sanitise the history of the building.
“They’ve just left some things, or have things very open,” she said. “I think that’s been part of the healing of this site, and the success of it, really that everybody’s very aware of what happened here, and there are positive futures that are starting to happen.”
The Sunbury Community Arts and Cultural Precinct was one of 64 winners and commendations at the awards, which span residential, community and commercial projects.
Awards jury chair Simon Knott said the winners included beloved landmarks that had transcended their function as pieces of infrastructure.
“We saw multiple community projects that are delightful sites of human congregation where community-centric design has been at the forefront – taking prosaic pieces of existing architecture and making them a place of recreation,” he said. “Sites with a grim history were also utterly transformed with deft hands and given new life as public hubs with a multitude of amenities.”
Other winners included 65 Dover Street, Cremorne, housing the Commons Health Club, for which Fieldwork won the top commercial architecture accolade; the new Footscray Hospital by COX Architecture and Billard Leece Partnership, which won the public architecture award; and the St Kilda Pier redevelopment, which won Jackson Clements Burrows, Site Office and AW Maritime the top award for urban design.
A former Toorak laundry converted into a one-bedroom apartment by Studio Hill won the highest honour for interior architecture, while Palmerston Street House by Robert Simeoni Architects won the top residential architecture award for house alterations and additions for its celebration of Carlton’s cultural and architectural heritage.
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