Aussie rules: an old Melbourne bookshop transformed into a modern family home

A designer has breathed new life into a narrow building that was once the city’s first feminist book storeWhen Kate Challis’s husband was a student in Melbourne in the 1990s, he bought a copy of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale from the city’s first feminist book store. On a busy street in the then-gritty district of Fitzroy, Shrew women’s bookshop was one of the few places in the city that sold Atwood’s work. Today, that same narrow shop, for