This is a gift on a roof. Froebel Carlton is located within the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Connect precinct. The brief was to design a series of external spaces and winter gardens over 3 levels, accommodating around 90 children from ages six months to five. Our response draws from the origins of Friedrich Fröbel’s kindergarten – a space of play and activity that nurtures creativity through the systematic deployment of a sequence of ‘gifts’. In this project, the gifts are a series of biophilic objects that either create a direct relationship to nature through the use of planting, natural materials and access to sun and air, or that create an indirect relationship to nature through the use of colour, texture, patterns and cloudlike forms that become a proxy of the natural world. The roof space supports a broad range of experiences for children, encouraging curiosity, exploration and growth. The project is Australia’s first vertical early learning center located on a hybrid engineered Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) building. We worked with care and precision to locate play equipment, fall attenuation and soil loads onto a CLT structure that hadn’t been designed to accommodate them. The small footprint of the center, its vertical arrangement and its inner urban location all serve as an exemplar for the future of early learning in urban environments.