Irma Ficarra didn't quite know what she was looking for back in 1988, only that she was pregnant, her husband was working and they needed a house.
When she walked into a tri-level townhouse at the 15-year-old cooperative housing project called Urambi Village, she knew she was home.
"You felt like you were going into a treehouse," she says.
It was one of 43 split-level and 29 courtyard houses set into the landscape, and had exposed rafters, timber decking, and was built of brown brick that blended perfectly into the bushland setting.
Her husband, David Ritchie, was hesitant when she told him she'd found their perfect home at Urambi Village in Kambah.
"Oh no, not there! That's a hippie set-up," he said at the time.
And he wasn't entirely wrong. Designed and built in the mid-1970s, Urambi was one of Canberra's first cooperative housing communities. It began as an experiment, to develop a new style of housing that was environmentally friendly, communal, accessible, and affordable.
Retired architect David Hobbes, who lives next door to Irma and David, says the story of Urambi's founding was a story of the times, when Whitlam was in government, and the air was filled with a spirit of change - in Canberra, at least.
"It was thought up by a young group of people, because Whitlam expanded the government departments greatly and brought a lot more public servants to Canberra," he says.
"They were all looking around for somewhere, and, no bones about it, they were well-educated, well-travelled, literate people who were looking for decent architecture, but perhaps couldn't afford an architect, personally."
The village was designed by architects Peter Bell and Michael Dysart, Sydney architects who'd been associated with Pettit & Sevitt, the project home company that revolutionised Australian mass-market architecture in the 1960s and 1970s.
The idea was to create spaces "designed to promote casual meetings" - there were limited entry areas for cars, and plenty of common facilities, including a pool, a tennis court and meeting rooms, with everything connected by winding paths through the trees and shrubs.
Another, smaller cooperative development went up across town in the same period, Wybalena Grove in Cook.
It's worth noting, though, that in staid, 1970s Canberra, planning authorities took some convincing, predicting Urambi would simply become a slum within a few years.
But it didn't, and remains a kind of utopia nestled in the sloping streets of suburban Tuggeranong - a relic of a time in the capital in which it was official policy to invite good architects to come down and do interesting things.
Swinger Hill, in Woden Valley, is another example of this, although the suburb's development predates Urambi by a few years. It's filled with terraces, atriums and courtyards - retro and classy and a cut above so much of what came after.
And there are examples of 1970s modernist design inspired by the Sydney School of Architecture from Belconnen to Weston Creek, and everywhere between.
The suburb's unified style has been diluted over the years by residents bringing in their own private architects but, as Hobbes points out, "part of why Urambi has survived so intact is because of the kind of lingering cooperative ethos".
The dream, back then, was for Canberra to have more and more of these cooperative projects, but no more eventuated.
"I think fewer people are willing to live a slightly cooperative, collaborative life," Hobbes says.
But back in the 1970s, when Canberra was considered something of an architectural laboratory, it was the younger generation who were looking for new ways of living.
Hobbes says many of the first inhabitants were aged between 25 and 35, "which says something about affordable homes back in the day". Many still live there, and are now in their mid-70s and 80s.
"It's still very much populated by typical Canberra-type people - diplomats, academics, public servants, professional people, but it's not pretentious," he says, although some of the original residents can get jealous about outsiders, lured into the serene walking paths and mature trees.
The homes are tightly held and, not surprisingly, worth considerably more these days.
Irma and David, meanwhile, are pleased to see young families arriving, and kids running down the paths, just as theirs had back in the 1980s and 90s.
They had only recently returned from a posting to Israel - David is a now-retired diplomat - when they arrived at Urambi in 1988. As their family grew and they moved into a larger, courtyard Urambi home, they've been on several more postings, to Sri Lanka, London and Paris.
But they're always relieved beyond measure to return home to their pocket of Kambah.
