An Industrial Designer’s Own Home Designed as an Inner-City Hidden Sanctuary House Tour

We wanted this space to feel like an escape from the city. As soon as you enter you can sort of go I'm home, it's calm, it's peaceful, the light's beautiful and you really feel like you're in your own little oasis and it could be anywhere. My name is Brad Swartz from Brad Swartz Architects and we were the architects on the project. So the idea behind this project in part is trying to create a prototype for inner city living and a prototype for what the new terrace could be My name is Henry Wilson. I'm a product and industrial designer. I'm co-collaborator with Brad Swartz. This is my home and studio. So we're in Darlinghurst in a little laneway that backs off Oxford Street called Langley Lane. Darlinghurst is pretty gritty. It's kind of known for its laneways and smaller confined spaces and terrace houses. An interesting mix of different sort of densities. I bought this site what was probably nine years ago and Brad was renting a desk at the terrace side and we got chatting and thought well maybe it was a good idea to put a DA in to see if we could maximise the plot at the back. So originally this rear lane location was empty so there was a great opportunity to do a brand new building here and create a really special rear lane addition. Almost a prototype for what could happen on this rear lane and in others. The original brief kept changing. I think early on we was very much a discussion. We thought about just doing a little garage with a studio on top and then as my sort of appetite for a bit of a riskier build or not riskier but just a bit more ambitious I suppose we started to flesh out a kind of a larger brief. So there was a lot of discussion around just elements and materials and the brief as much as sort of the spatial planning I wanted this block to be able to be divided at some point and also have the ability to work here and live here and I also wanted to maximise the floor space. So this project and planning really flips the typical terrace instead of having your living spaces on the ground floor which always struggle with privacy issues that little thing where you kind of walk past a terrace in the inner city and someone's got the door half open and you can see them watching tv is something we wanted to try to get rid of. In this we flipped it upside down and we set the ground floor as a studio slash parking area then bedroom levels and then you set up living space on the top floor which gets all your natural light your views aspect outlook and and the best cross ventilation. We worked really closely with Henry to come up with a floor plan that both worked for him but also was super efficient in the space this this building occupies a footprint of sort of 50-ish square meters and I think we probably got the circulation space down to maybe two square meters and part of that was through having a spiral staircase. The staircase was a little bit of a moving target as we started to play with the floor plates I became more and more convinced that a spiral staircase would be a critical kind of piece and really I mean the obvious choice then given my experience with casting and having some tie back to that is I thought well how could we create a kind of cast concrete tread that we could feed up like a kind of backbone of the building and tie it all these levels together with this kind of very rigid form. So one thing Henry and I really wanted to do was use materials in the house in unique ways but you know reflect their natural forms. Travertines used throughout but we used it without grout lines so you know although they're just a standard size tile it's always got a slab like feel. The kitchen's stainless and it's typically reserved for commercial settings but here we've kind of designed it as one element that feels beautiful. The kitchen can present as a quite a clean monolithic space if you like so it doesn't start to crowd and pull into what is really quite a small space up here. Fridge itself is integrated into the joinery which is important to me the way that this kitchen is sort of meant to be a kind of elements blocks that were put together and not have too much of a defined kitchen-ness about it. On this project from the outset and one of the things Henry was particularly keen on was exploring the use of glass blocks as a way to really create a light bright space on what this kind of quite exposed side. So glass blocks always something I wanted to use and was inspired really by Maison Verre in Paris. Also just wanting to create something that was a bit of a jewel in a kind of otherwise fairly mundane laneway you know have something that was kind of a bit special that you walked around you saw and you felt there'd been a kind of a surprise element there from the outside but then I also like the way that that would reflect and refract inside. My favourite part of this home is probably this upper level here being able to be up off the street, have great natural light, good vista down towards the harbour and over that kind of eastern side of Darlinghurst. It feels like you can really get away from the city up here and yeah it's really where I kind of linger and spend my time. I probably don't have one favourite part of the home I think the way all the elements come together is what I love about it. The way the collaboration really created a beautiful and refined resolve.