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To learn that 30-year-old architect, Zahava Elenberg was the winner of the prestigious 2003 Telstra Australian Young Business Women's Award comes as little surprise. After all, a woman who simultaneously juggles two rapidly growing businesses with a newborn baby and ambitious warehouse conversion has to be a driven one. Yet Zahava not only took it in her stride, she capped it all off by launching a third business.
Zahava is one half of Elenberg Fraser, a Melbourne-based architectural firm she started with husband Callum Fraser in 1998 while in her final year of university. Two years later, the couple started scouting for inner-city premises that could be a home, an office and a smart showroom for a burgeoning idea - a complete furnishing service for homes and investment properties - they would call Move-in.
A former textile laminating factory in Fitzroy provided the bare bones of the project. "It was regarded as the ugliest building in the area," says Zahava of the 1960s warehouse they purchased in 2000 while she was pregnant. "But we thought it was so beautiful structurally, we could see how it would work as a home and office."
They quickly forged ahead with plans to convert the twostorey factory into a warehouse that would accommodate their master plan. The ground floor would eventually become the Move-in showroom and garages; the upstairs a two-bedroom apartment and the Elenberg Fraser office, each with a separate entrance at street level. Critical to the design was allowing for the apartment to be converted into more office space when the business expanded.
From the outside, little has changed, except that there's substantially more glazing than before. In addition, a hole was punched through the building on the west side to frame the large windows of the new office. At ground level, a shopfrontt window now tempts passers-by with a selection of Move-in's contemporary furnishings.
Internally, the factory was gutted, with most pre-existing walls removed to accommodate the new configuration. 'Ve really liked the idea of living and working in the same place," Zahava explains en route to the office. She finds the layout particularly conducive to running the businesses and looking after the couple's daughter, now three. "it's so much easier when you can flit between home and work," she adds n keeping with the fabric of the old factory, they wanted the conversion to be "robust and simple". The 250-square-metre apartment is testament to this streamlined approach. With the kitchen's large stainless-steel bench forming the 'centrepiece', the apartment's only propel rooms are at either end. the couple's bedroom with walk-in robe and a bdthroom on one side and their daughter's room on the other. Beside the kitchen is a staircase leading to a mezzanine floor that's entirely devoted to storage, keeping the downstairs area blissfully free of clutter. At the living room end of the apartment is an eight metre long "mobile library", as Zahava calls it, because "the books are constantly moving between home and office".
Retaining the original factory floor has made it a permanent reminder of the building's past. "The floor has a history and a pattern of splashes and dents running through it that wanted to keep, so we didn't even grind it back -- just coated the whole thing with a high-gloss polyurethane," Zahava explains.
Similarly, the vaulted ceiling was left exposed, unashamedly displaying the waterproof silver sarking beneath the corrugatediron roof. High windows keep the apartment drenched in sunlight, and a commercial air-conditioning system alleviates any concerns about the iron roof and muggy Melbourne summers. However, according to Zahava, the roof has one disadvantage: "When it rains heavily, it's too loud to speak on the phone!"
Artificial lighting is one of the few defining factors in the large open space. Industrial-strength pendant lights dangle high above the dining table and island bench, while the living room has downlights that can be dimmed and spotlights strategically placed to highlight the couple's prized collection of art. "My mother has a contemporary gallery and I've grown up in that world, so Callum and 1 have always been keen collectors of pieces from our own generation," says Zahava, who admits they succumb to buying at least one large artwork every year.
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