Brunswick is one of the few inner north pockets where you can still buy an apartment, walk to almost everything, and be in the city in fifteen minutes. That combination is why it is competitive, and why it pays to know what you are looking at before you start inspecting.
Here is what we would want to know if we were buying here.
First, work out which Brunswick you mean
This trips up more buyers than anything else on the list. Brunswick is three separate suburbs with three separate postcodes.
Brunswick, 3056. The middle. Sydney Road runs through it, along with Barkly Square, the train line and most of the nightlife. Busiest and best connected.
Brunswick East, 3057. East of Lygon Street across to Merri Creek. Quieter and greener, more residential, closer to Carlton North and Fitzroy North. Trams rather than trains.
Brunswick West, 3055. West of Moreland Road, more traditional housing stock, further from the action and generally more affordable.
They are treated as one place in conversation and as three in every property search, valuation and school zone. Set your alerts across all three or you will miss stock, and check which one an address actually sits in before you fall in love with it.
The pockets, and what living in each is like
Within those postcodes the character changes street by street.
Sydney Road. Loud, busy, brilliant. Two kilometres of restaurants, bars, live music and shops. Wonderful to live near, and full of life at night. If you’re looking at an apartment fronting it, swing past on a Friday evening to get a feel for the buzz.
Lygon Street north. Calmer than the Carlton stretch, a strong cafe and restaurant scene. Sits on the Brunswick and Brunswick East boundary.
Nicholson Street and the eastern edge. Trams straight down to the city, and closest to Merri Creek, CERES and the creek trail. This is where most of the newer apartment stock in Brunswick East sits.
The Merri Creek side. Green, quiet, walking and cycling paths all the way to Northcote and beyond. The trade off is a longer walk to the shops.
New build or established
Brunswick has plenty of both, and they suit different buyers.
Established. Often larger on paper, frequently cheaper per square metre, and there is a lot of 1960s and 70s walk up stock. The catch is running costs. Single glazing, no insulation to speak of, electric wall heaters, and energy ratings that would not pass today. You feel that every winter.
New build. Better thermal performance, better acoustics, usually a car space and often a lift. You are paying for that up front, and quality varies enormously between developers.
There is a third category worth knowing about. Completed new stock, where the building is finished and you can walk through the actual apartment rather than a display suite. You give up any off the plan stamp duty benefit, and in exchange you see exactly what you are buying, there is no sunset clause risk and no waiting.
If off the plan is on your list, check the current status of the Victorian off the plan duty concession before you rely on it. It has been extended more than once and the eligibility rules have changed with each extension, so take the State Revenue Office position rather than a brochure’s.
What to actually check inside a building
Once you are past the photos, this is the list. We have put how we approached each one at Elm Grove alongside it, not because it is the only answer, but so you can see what the question looks like when someone has actually thought about it.
Natural light
How much light an apartment gets, and when it gets it, changes how it feels more than almost anything else. Orientation is one part of that. So is where the windows sit, how tall they are, what they look out at, and how the floorplan is arranged around them. A well placed window in the right room can do more than a wall of glass in the wrong one. Ask which way the living room points, then go back at a different time of day and see it for yourself.
At Elm Grove we used floor to ceiling windows so that many apartments look out into the native gardens and sculptures rather than at a wall. Outlook was part of the brief, not a leftover.
Glazing
Double glazing is standard in good new builds and rare in older stock. It affects heating bills, and just as importantly, noise. In Brunswick, where a lot of buildings sit near tram lines and Sydney Road, it matters.
Elm Grove is double glazed throughout, with flyscreens fitted so you can actually open the windows in summer. The thing people notice first walking in is how quiet it is.
Energy rating
New apartments carry a NatHERS star rating. The minimum under the National Construction Code is six stars average. Anything meaningfully above that is a genuine point of difference and will show up in your bills. Ask for the number for the specific apartment, not the building average, because averages hide a wide range.
Elm Grove averages 8 stars, with many apartments rating well above that. It is fully electric with no gas, and operationally carbon neutral.
Ventilation
Can you open windows on two sides and get air moving through? Cross flow ventilation is the difference between needing the aircon in February and not. Single aspect apartments cannot do it.
Ceiling fans are fitted throughout Elm Grove, in the living areas and the bedrooms, which keeps air moving on still days and does more for summer comfort than most people expect. The Flexi Room works on the same idea. Corner sliding doors recess into the ceiling and walls, so opening the room pulls daylight deeper into the apartment and, in many of the floorplans, opens up cross flow ventilation through the home.
Storage
The most common regret we hear from people moving out of a house. Look for a linen cupboard, a broom cupboard, and somewhere for a vacuum. Then look for the storage cage and check where it is.
Every Elm Grove apartment has a dedicated linen cupboard and a full height broom cupboard with a power point in it for the vacuum. Unglamorous, and the thing downsizers mention most.
Noise
Stand in the apartment and be quiet for a minute. Listen for the lift, the corridor, the road, the neighbours. Then ask what the party wall construction is.
Balcony depth, not area
A long thin balcony is a walkway. You need roughly two and a half metres of depth to fit a table and actually sit at it.
Balconies on the Elm Grove three bedroom homes start at around 18 square metres, with the largest at 97. Depth was the point, so they are usable rather than decorative.
The kitchen
Look at where things are, not what they are made of. Is there a power point where you will actually use one. Is there a water point to the fridge cavity. Is there bench space either side of the cooktop.
We left the island bench at Elm Grove without a sink in it deliberately. It sounds like a small thing. It turns the island into somewhere people gather rather than somewhere you stand washing up with your back to the room.
Outlook
Not a view, an outlook. Whether you look at greenery, a street or a light well changes how the apartment feels every single day.
Owners corporation, the part people skip
Get the owners corporation certificate and read it properly.
Check the quarterly fees and what they cover. Check the maintenance fund balance, because a low balance in an older building means a special levy is coming and you will pay it. Read the minutes for the last two years and look for anything about water ingress, cladding, or ongoing disputes. Check the rules on pets, short stays and renovations.
A well run building with higher fees is nearly always a better buy than a cheap one with a fund that cannot cover a roof.
Transport and parking
Brunswick is well served. Trains on the Upfield line, trams on Sydney Road, Lygon Street and Nicholson Street, and bike lanes running most of the way into the city.
Three things to check. First, whether the apartment comes with a car space, and whether you need one. Plenty of people here run one car between two, or none. Second, if there is a space, what kind it is. Stackers are common in newer Brunswick buildings and they add a step every time you come and go, so ask before you assume. Third, whether the street has permit parking and whether new developments in the area are excluded from permits, which is increasingly common. If you have two cars and one space, find out now.
Elm Grove car spaces are drive on, no stackers.
Who is buying here
Brunswick apartments used to be mostly investors and first home buyers. That has shifted.
A lot of the demand now is downsizers coming out of family homes in the inner north who want to stay in the area, and households who want three bedrooms and a real kitchen without moving to the fringe. That is why more of the newer stock is being built larger.
If you are making that move, our guide to downsizing from a house to an apartment covers the practical side.
Walk it before you buy it
The best advice we can give is not about the building at all.
Pick a Saturday, park somewhere near a place you are considering, and leave the car. Get a coffee. Walk to the supermarket. Walk to the tram. See how far it really is and how the walk feels. Then come back on a weeknight.
You are buying a neighbourhood as much as an apartment, and an hour on foot will tell you more than any floorplan.
Looking in Brunswick East
East Brunswick Village is a 20 minute neighbourhood built on the former Sidney Cooke Fasteners site, six kilometres from the CBD.
The everyday shop is covered inside the precinct. Coles and Liquorland, David Bros Grocer for organic fruit, vegetables and dry goods, To Be Frank Bakery, Hagens Organic Butcher and Bellboy Cafe, which roasts its coffee on site and does a bagel menu.
To eat and drink there is Rumi and its bar The Rocket Society, Bridge Road Brewers in a 350 seat dining hall, Dodam for Korean, Tacoya for Japanese, Siconi Gelato, Blackhearts & Sparrows for wine, and FOMO Cinema, the food focused cinema from the Cinema Nova team.
For everything else, Choice Pharmacy, Inner North Medical Clinic, Little Bookroom and MadeBy Studio, plus the Wellness Centre with Project Better gym and F2 Collective pilates. There is also over 2,300 square metres of communal gardens that every resident has access to, not just the residents of one building.
Elm Grove is our newest address. It sits on the northern edge of the Village with its own street address and its own front doors, and with only 45 apartments it feels more like a small residential building than part of a precinct.
It is also where we have built our largest homes. They were designed for owner occupiers, and a lot of the detail came from listening to people already living at EBV. Cavity sliding doors that save space without looking like a compromise. Wall ovens in selected homes. Timber flooring running through so the apartment reads as one space. The Flexi Room, which is a second bedroom when you close the doors and part of the living area when you open them.
Every apartment comes with a car space, and the tram is at the end of the street, so plenty of residents barely use it.
Elm Grove is complete, and there are apartments ready to move into now. Which means you can do the thing we recommend at the top of this article and actually walk through the apartment you would be buying.
If you would like to, register your interest and we will arrange a time.
