Great master plans aim to develop and enhance a community. It is harder to design the exact moment when neighbours start recognising one another’s dogs.
At Moonee Valley Park, Leeanne sees it happening every day. Walking home through Tote Park with her two dogs, she passes neighbours along the garden path the Stonepine House, stopping to chat or pat a familiar dog.
Later, at TOTE Bar & Dining, that same sense of community continues, with farmiliar faces never far away.
“It hasn’t felt like a new development,” she says. “A lot of that is due to the established communal gardens and all the mature plants and trees around the precinct.”
With almost 500 homes now completed, Moonee Valley Park is reaching a point where its original promise is becoming a reality.
The 40-hectare redevelopment of the Moonee Valley Racecourse site was conceived as a “neighbourhood within a park”, with about half the site devoted to green open space. The Eveline, its latest residential release, will extend that neighbourhood onto the former grandstand site.
Leeanne lives in Stonepine House with her husband, two teenage children and two dogs. Their apartment, she says, is a quiet haven, but family life easily spills beyond the front door.
Mornings often begin with walking the dogs through nearby Queens Park or the surrounding streets. Leeanne walks to the tram for work, her children catch the bus to school, and the local cafes, restaurants, library and gym have become part of the family’s routine.
Within Moonee Valley Park, they use the communal garden, gym, dog wash and workshop, as well as the pool, sauna and rooftop spaces of Trackside House.
What Leeanne values most, however, is not a particular facility but the time the move had given back to the family.
“We are a busy working family and downtime is precious,” she says. “Less commuting time plus less time cleaning and maintaining means more time socialising and spending time out and about doing things we want to do.”
Moonee Valley Park’s development director Simon Lewing says that movement between home. landscape and the surrounding neighbourhood is fundamental to the master plan.
The precinct deliberately combines lively gathering places with quieter green spaces. Tote Park and Stonepine Square offer places to meet and connect, while landscaped paths provide a calm route through the precinct.
Much of the landscaped public realm is privately owned but publicly accessible, and cars are largely kept below ground, allowing pedestrians, planting and open space to dominate at ground level.
“Some spaces are quite busy and vibrant, and then there are other areas, like Maple Walk, where you can find peace an quiet,” says Lewin.
The connections between those spaces matter just as much. Lewin says the aim for the people to move between the stages of Moonee Valley Park without encountering an obvious boundary.
“You barely notice where Thomas Street Gardens ends and The Trackside House Gardens begin,” he says. “The two tie together seamlessly.”
That philosophy will continue at The Eveline, where the expanded Stonepine Square and new underpass will strengthen the pedestrian connection between the residential precinct and the racecourse
Beyond it, Cox Place is planned to add shops, hospitality and everyday services within walking distance, while the racecourse infield is intended to provide further recreation and community space as the precinct develops.
For Leeanne, those additions will make an already walkable precinct more complete. She looks forward to the neighbourhood shops and cafes, and to the infield becoming another part of daily life.
But perhaps the harder part of creating a neighbourhood is already underway.
“It looks like it’s always been here,” she says, “in the best possible way.”
Article by Domain.com.au
