Heritage Overlays: What You Can and Cannot Change
14 August 2026
A heritage overlay is not a ban on renovating. It is a set of rules about what is visible from the street — and the rear of your house is usually fair game.
Good blocks, good schools, and houses that have simply outgrown the family in them. In the east most of our work is adding room at the rear and reworking what is already there, rather than starting again.
House extensions
You already have the land, the school zone and the neighbours. An extension keeps all of that and replaces the part of the house that no longer works — usually the rear, and usually the kitchen and living end of it.
Most eastern-suburbs blocks are wide enough for a ground-floor addition with a genuine backyard left over. Where they are not, a second storey is priced against what the existing footings and frame can carry.
Full renovations
Houses built through the seventies and eighties in the east are structurally sound and internally dated. We reconfigure the plan, replace the wiring, plumbing and roofing where they have reached their age, then finish it.
One supervisor runs the job from set-out to handover and answers the phone the whole way through.
Yes. Strip-out, asbestos assessment and removal, service isolation and rubbish removal are all included and scheduled before the new work starts.
Usually yes. We stage the job so you keep a kitchen and a bathroom, seal the works off from the rest of the house, and give you a programme up front showing which weeks will be the disruptive ones.
Usually only a building permit, unless the block carries an overlay or the addition exceeds the height and setback controls. We confirm which applies before quoting.
Yes. Sloping sites need engineered footings and often a split-level addition; both are priced from the geotechnical report rather than estimated.
A heritage overlay is not a ban on renovating. It is a set of rules about what is visible from the street — and the rear of your house is usually fair game.
From first sketch to handover, a realistic programme for a Melbourne new build — including the approval months most timelines quietly leave out.
Slope is not the problem. Fighting the slope is. How split levels, suspended slabs and honest early engineering keep a difficult site affordable.
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