#RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE PROJECTS
19 Waterloo Street by SJB
Behind an existing terrace in Sydney, a tiny new build defies expectations by creating an apparently spacious yet private home that considers its neighbours and the planet.
Hidden in the dense urban jungle of Sydney’s Surry Hills lies a scattering of tiny residential gems. So small that they are incon-spicuous to passers-by, they have nevertheless drawn attention on a national and global scale. All within a few streets of each other are little treasures such as Durbach Block Jaggers’ Droga rooftop apartment (the 1998 Australian Institute of Architects’ Robin Boyd Award winner), Domenic Alvaro’s Small House (World Architecture Festival House of the Year 2011), and Hill Thalis Architecture and Urban Projects’ Studios 54, a slender tower of maisonettes that won the Aaron Bolot Award for Multiple Housing in the 2015 New South Wales Architecture Awards. These three projects (and if you hunted for more, you would probably find some) all conjure a sense of spatial delight from minimal and neglected spaces, on the kind of sites often deemed too difficult to develop.
In 2022, another diamond in the urban rough was seeded in this tightly grained enclave: a house nestled on a meagre 30-square-metre footprint. Designed by SJB director Adam Haddow to house himself, husband Michael and puppy Eric, the new residence lies just down the road from Haddow’s previous dwelling, Cleveland Rooftop, a more spacious wonderland sitting atop a repurposed warehouse building. On the decision to downsize, Haddow describes waking up one day and realizing he and Michael were “spending 80 percent of their time in 20 percent of their apartment.” They had a vision to live smaller and simpler without sacrificing anything. The couple sold the Cleveland Street address and invested in a multipurpose Waterloo Street site, which now includes an existing terrace containing a shopfront and upstairs apartment, and a new build at the rear. As a micro-mixed-use development, 19 Waterloo Street is a refreshing complement to the large-scale developments for which the practice is better known.
Sited at the end of a row of terraces, the mini compound sits freshly among its neighbours. The existing corner terrace has been painted in the now recognizable “SJB Green” – it stands out from the dreary, dated commercial architecture that dominates the rest of the streetscape. There’s a gentle buzz of pedestrian activity outside. As you turn the corner into the small street, the new house is revealed behind the old. What was once a stuffy brick add-on, of the type seen behind many an older Sydney terrace, has been replaced by a bright new facade full of animated and textured volume. Brickwork and arched windows pay tribute to neighbouring terraces, but the golden hew and haphazard spacing refigure these familiar tropes in unfamiliar ways.
The house has 15 different openings onto the street, including windows and recesses of all shapes and sizes. On my first approach, it is raining, and I wait patiently on the footpath, expecting to see a moving silhouette behind one of the many apertures. There is no doorbell, and eventually, I am forced to call out. Haddow’s head pops into sight, and I am let in, the door opening into a surprisingly spacious and private enclave despite the tiny footprint and the proximity to the street.
My initial impression, faced with 19 Waterloo Street’s whimsical facade, is of a contemporary architect’s folly: a form of “primitive hut” for a successful practitioner at the peak of his game. Follies are typically free from the constraints of time and money – and spared the demands of a complicated brief set by others. They are small projects in which architects who no longer have to prove themselves are able to freely explore ideas. Other follies that spring to mind are Peter Stutchbury’s backyard Tent House, the sprinkling of John Wardlisms on his farm on Bruny Island, and even Le Corbusier’s holiday log cabin, Cabanon, on the grounds of Eileen Gray’s ill-fated E-1027 villa on the French Riviera. What these examples have in common, however, is a sense of transience: they are makeshift structures used briefly, often constructed as places of retreat or escape. In contrast, 19 Waterloo Street is intended, despite its miniature proportions, as a primary residence for its owners, deep in the urban abyss.
The planning of the house is a wonderful interplay of varying levels, with seven different floors in total, all cantilevered around a slender central stair. The house stands no taller than its three-storey neighbours, and all seven levels are contained within the 12-metre height limit imposed on the build by the City of Sydney. Each floor is designed for its own function, and a journey from the street to the rooftop takes you through the phases of a modern working day. At the lowest level, a semi-subterranean space is geared for working from home. Above it, the entry area feeds upwards into spaces for living and then cooking. Climbing higher, the skinny stairs access more private realms for dressing, sleeping and bathing, before opening onto a rooftop garden complete with chimney tower, pizza oven and a crowning beautiful bottle tree selected by landscape architect Will Dangar of Dangar Barin Smith.
To make the house work volumetrically, it has been stacked like a game of Tetris; all of the more utilitarian rooms are sat upon each other at the minimum 2.1-metre height. Thankfully, the living and sleeping zones are given more space, with generous 3.6-metre ceilings that evoke the beautiful older style of European apartments. Remarkably, given the small footprint and the sheer number of rooms and levels contained within, the spaces of 19 Waterloo Street never feel claustrophobic. At several instances during my visit, there were half a dozen of us sitting in the living room, yet it felt calm and surprisingly spacious. Haddow has borrowed and cheated space throughout with carefully placed windows and mirrors – and the late great Nicholas Harding’s beautiful 2022 Wynne Landscape Prize-winning painting Eora , which adorns the entire length of one wall.
At just 69 square metres in total, with two bathrooms and 1.5 bedrooms (the study is occasionally used as a bedroom by a teenage niece), 19 Waterloo Street would, if it were an apartment, fail to meet the guidelines set by the New South Wales Department of Planning and Environment’s Apartment Design Guide . 1 However, this is a case of knowing the rules in order to bend them. Haddow’s in-depth knowledge of the state policy has enabled him to skirt the precise numerical requirements in a creative manner, furthering the argument that while the policy has raised the general standard of apartments, it has suppressed any design excellence or push for new ideas from which dense apartment buildings might benefit.
The project builds on Haddow’s and SJB’s ideologies around design and sustainability – which go beyond the current tokenistic carbon obsession to look at projects more holistically. For Haddow, this has included using his industry connections to source recycled materials and designing around some of the common environmental pitfalls that affect many construction builds. For example, the bricks that make up the fanciful street elevation are surplus from the highly lauded Phoenix Central Park by John Wardle Architects (now known as Wardle) and Durbach Block Jaggers. As happens with any delivery of bricks, some were broken in transport, and this irregularity has been used to deliberate effect. The broken pieces have been laid on edge to create datum lines that break up the facade and relate it to surrounding buildings. By repurposing these cast-offs from one of Sydney’s most well-known recent builds, 19 Waterloo Street gives a subtle nod to its contemporaries. To the trained eye, it is almost like a beautiful, rough cousin of Wardle and DBJ’s own folly in the Sydney CBD.
Behind the whimsy and warm tactility of the building’s exterior, the house contains an envious curation of furniture, art and fabrics, with interior design by Haddow himself. But in the end, what is most marvellous about 19 Waterloo Street is not its many levels or its multitude of fanciful windows; rather, it is the unusual generosity of space and privacy one finds within. In the dense landscape of Surry Hills, this sense of space is unusual and refreshing, especially in a building so petite. It’s a fantastic and enviable model for small living from a designer clearly converted to the inner-urban lifestyle. As I return to my suburban home, strewn with toddler’s toys and the chaos of contemporary family life, it is hard not to wonder how Haddow’s small-living ideology might work for those in other walks of life. It would be interesting to see how Haddow, with his long experience in larger multi-residential projects, might translate these ideas into spaces that work for larger families or share housing. In doing so, he might just manage to install his admirable folly into the grander housing narrative.
1. NSW Department of Planning and Environment, Apartment Design Guide: Tools for improving the design of residential apartment development (NSW Government: Sydney, July 2015); planning.nsw.gov.au.policy- and-legislation/housing/apartment-design-guide.
Credits
Project
19 Waterloo Street
Architect
SJB Sydney
Surry Hills, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Project Team
Adam Haddow, Stewart Cowan
Consultants
Brick supply: Krause Bricks
Builder and project manager: Promena Projects
Landscape architect: Dangar Barin Smith
Structural engineer: Van der Meer
Town planner: SJB Planning
Aboriginal Nation
Gadigal
Site Details
Site type: Urban
Project Details
Status: Built
Category: Residential
Type: Adaptive re-use, Alts and adds
