Australia has long been celebrated for its magnificent beach and bush environments, but more than ever before, its high quality lifestyle is essentially urban, catered to by a profusion of cultural venues, restaurants, bars, cafés, sports clubs and boutiques.
The last five years have also seen an unprecedented proliferation of exciting residential projects - apartments and townhouses, industrial conversions and extensions - by a new generation of architects.
Australia City Living showcases some fifty projects across all the major cities of Australia. They include high-rise developments; bold contemporary townhouses, some of them adapted from Victorian dwellings; and warehouses and factories converted to living spaces, often with traces of their original crumbling brickwork and plaster remaining alongside pristine new interiors. In areas that used to be sprawling suburbs, but are increasingly being brought into the city's orbit, newly-built villas maximize the space and light available on ever-tighter plots.
Such is the extraordinary creative confidence of Australia today that the present and the future coexist comfortably with the past. There are no rules, just a consistent spirit of innovation.