Merchant Builders

About the book:

Founded in 1965, innovative development company Merchant Builders pioneered cluster housing and townhouse prototypes that reimagined suburbia as relational rather than purely private. Their design briefs called for ambiguity: interiors that resisted rigid functionalism, and exteriors that blurred thresholds between house, neighbour and landscape. Pergolas, verandas and sunscreens created spaces of inbetweenness-sites for encounter, neighbourliness, and shared amenity.

Edited by Alan Pert and Philip Goad, Merchant Builders: This is Not Subtopia! reframes the story of suburbia, drawing on newly uncovered archives, photographs and firsthand interviews. It positions Merchant Builders’ suburban experiments as a profound, if under-recognised, response to the problem of subdivision, and connects their legacy to today’s urgent debates on affordability, sustainability, and the endless expansion of suburbia.

More than nostalgia, Merchant Builders is a call to arms: a reminder that our suburbs can be designed for sharing, ecology, and community.