Paddo Push

It was an opportunity not to be missed: a double-width block with off-street parking in the sought-after Sydney suburb of Paddington. However, there were two sticking points: an

intractable group of siblings who had inherited the deceased estate and couldn’t agree on the selling price, and a vigilant local heritage group dedicated to conserving the area, including the near derelict, two-storey Victorian house that stood on the block.

Amelia Holliday of Aileen Sage Architects and her husband, builder David Lakes, waited patiently for a year, out-seeing two real-estate companies charged with selling the house, until their offer was finally accepted. Once the property was theirs, they searched for anything that could be saved, but there was virtually nothing undamaged or unaltered.

“We looked at various options to keep bits of the building, but structurally it wasn’t worth it,” says Amelia. “It was in a pretty poor state. The front of the house was literally built on dirt. There were no foundations.”

So, sadly, the original house had to go. But, apart from the land, the other vital feature the new owners had purchased was the building envelope. The original two-storey house, with a carriageway on one side, had a steeply pitched roof and a single- storey wing behind. Butted up against the rear boundary of the level 240 square metre block was another two-storey building – the old stables, remodelled decades ago into a self-contained flat. The footprint of the new house mirrors what was there: two full-width, two-storey sections book-end the block, linked by a narrower, single-storey living area along the southern boundary. This floor plan conserved open space on the northern side of the house for a courtyard garden.

“What we bought was an envelope that enabled us to build to various boundaries,” Amelia explains. “But we have pulled away from those boundaries in places in order to gain cross-ventilation and little pockets of garden and light. The block faces due north on one side, so basically we were trying to create a north-facing house on an east-west block.”

Amelia worked with her business partner, Isabelle Toland, to design a flexible house that will accommodate a growing family’s changing needs. A rich emerald green door (a nod to husband David’s Irish heritage) opens to a wide entry hall with a polished concrete floor. To the left is a cosy sitting room complete with an open fireplace, while on the right is a powder room, followed by a compact laundry. Beyond a flight of open-riser stairs that leads to two bedrooms and a bathroom above is the living area – a generous space flooded with light streaming in from the courtyard garden through a trio of French doors, as well as a bubble-shaped skylight in the planted roof overhead.

At the rear of the ground floor is a large kitchen, its chic, stained black joinery belying the fact it’s made from plywood offcuts. On one side, a bank of windows looks out onto the second of the courtyards, where tendrils of star jasmine are beginning to creep up a pink rendered wall. An island bench of matching black joinery with a slim marble counter top and raw brass frame separates the kitchen from the dining area. Sliding doors on one side of the room open onto the main courtyard and, on the other, to another narrow courtyard space at the rear of the block. When both sets of doors are open, cool air washes through the interior.

A second flight of stairs leads from the dining room to the master bedroom above, with a spacious walk-through wardrobe and an elegant ensuite bathroom. A window seat on one side of the bedroom allows views across the planted roof of the living area, while above the bed, clerestory windows frame typical inner- city views of rooftops, chimneys and tree boughs. Other windows are glazed with opaque textured glass in various patterns to provide privacy.

“In the old house we found only one lovely window,” says Amelia. “The frame was rotten so it couldn’t be saved, but we’ve used a lot of the same type of textured glass around the house as a memory.”

Downstairs there are two other traces of the original house. Old paling fence timber was used to frame up the off-form concrete pillars in the living area, leaving an indelible pattern. And outside, shading the new entry porch, are three frangipanis – large cuttings that were taken from two venerable trees that once stood in the front garden. Minded by a cousin on the central coast for a couple of years, the trees were transported back to Sydney when the house was finished and planted in a new garden bed outside the front door, thereby quietly reinstating a living element of the original streetscape.