Name: NEVER TOO SMALL: Japanese Inspired Sydney Terrace House, 47sqm/506sqft
Uploaded: 2025-05-05T08:27:39.000Z
Duration: 11 min 10 s
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For the design of Hidden Garden House, we were particularly inspired by Japanese temples and the hidden gardens and special places that you find in really dense cities like Tokyo.

When you're living in the middle of the city, there's this hustle and urgency and energy to the life that happens around you.

So we liked this idea of in the middle of Darlinghurst in Sydney's bustling heart, providing this place that would bring peace and quiet and calm to our clients' lives.

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This terrace house is located in Darlinghurst, which is an inner city neighbourhood that's quite dense, just on the fringe of the Sydney CBD, and it's characterised by a lot of small terrace homes, pocket parks, and really charming streets.

The original house was built in the 1890s and it was originally workers' accommodation, as was really common in this neighbourhood at the time.

More recently into the 20th and 21st centuries, it was used as domestic housing.

The house is the home to Laura and Amin, who are a pair of creatives, alongside their dog and their cat.

Our clients originally moved into the terrace and found it to be very dark, very damp and dilapidated.

The original house was a two-storey terrace.

The original staircase cut the terrace into two.

Even though Laura and Amin had an outdoor space, it was quite heavily overlooked by all of the neighbours.

The stair was moved to the edge of the house, and so it sleeves in along one boundary, and beneath it we managed to tuck in the laundry and some bulk storage.

We've also included our little hidden garden, so it's a courtyard that you can access from that easement laneway.

The green roof sits where the previous deck was and crowns the new extension we have at the back of the terrace house.

The bathroom was also relocated upstairs.

You enter the house off this really charming Darlinghurst laneway.

When you open the door, you get to see the living room and the hidden garden in the distance.

Behind the front door, there's a series of little brass hooks, designed and commissioned by Laura, along with the door hardware as part of the house.

Right beside the front door, there's also a bench, which can be used as a seat or also to house different objects.

So at the moment, it's home to Laura and Amman's record player and speakers.

In the front two rooms, we put down some Victorian ash floorboards, and they're a really light, bright, consistent timber, and so they help bring some warmth to the space.

Laura commissioned a custom sofa for the space, so it's really well designed in proportion to the room.

In one corner, there's quite a petite bookshelf.

And above that is a swinging potence lamp that can be tucked away or pulled out, depending on where Laura and Amman would like their light positioned.

Stepping up into the dining space, the L-shaped bench wraps around to provide seating for a custom dining table.

We worked with Laura and Amman to design and commission a table that was a little bit narrower than normal, but also quite long to fit the space.

To the other side of the dining room, we have the laundry, which sits concealed beneath the stair.

We also have a washer dryer, which is really space efficient.

Tucked behind one of the fixed panels, there's also some extra storage, so it really makes the most of all of the room that we have behind and beneath those stairs.

Right at the edge, the bench pulls to actually become the second step up to the kitchen, and there's an original stone block, which we found in the Holmes Foundation, which forms the first step.

Coming up into the kitchen, we step onto the new part of the house.

We floated the idea of Laura, who's a ceramicist, making some tiles for the house.

So her handmade terracotta tiles are also present on the floor of the kitchen.

In the passageway, we have another custom design piece of furniture, which is a day bed that has a timber base.

And Laura's also furnished this area really beautifully with a custom ceramic artwork that she made.

The kitchen is the back of the terrace house, and it's got a brass benchtop and folded custom integrated sink.

All of the cabinetry is Victorian ash veneer, and we chose to not include any handles, but instead do a sharknose edge pull on all of the joinery just to make it really sleek and calm and minimal.

The gas stove sits directly on the countertop, which gives it a really seamless, minimal look.

We actually have a concealed LED light strip, and that washes this really beautiful soft light down the back wall.

Laura and Ammon were very willing to, I guess, sacrifice some of the things that we often have in our kitchen, so things like a microwave and a toaster, and they didn't feel the need for a large pantry or fridge.

The really nice byproduct of this was that we were able to keep all the joinery really low and really minimal.

That also means that the kitchen is really uncluttered and that the countertop doesn't end up crowded out with a million appliances.

It was a really deliberate decision on behalf of ourselves and Laura and Ammon to make the garden ornamental rather than a place that you would go out and sit in.

It's somewhat counterintuitive, but we often find that if you have less house and more garden, our homes often end up feeling more spacious.

And that's just because you can sit inside at your dining room table or on your lounge and look out and get access to that light and greenery and sky.

Because it has windows on all three sides, it provides really beautiful, soft, natural light to all of those spaces so that they don't need to rely on any artificial lighting during the day.

And then in the kitchen, we have a big fixed piece of glass, which is complemented by a fixed ventilation solid panel that can help with cooking and smells and all of that kind of thing.

For the courtyard design, we worked really closely with Kirstie Kendall, who's an incredible landscape architect.

The crowning feature is the Japanese maple, which is a beautiful tree and one that changes throughout the season.

There's a datum line that we have, which expresses Laura's tiles, and having those glazed tiles really enhances and complements the courtyard by drawing light and bouncing light around not just the courtyard, but the interior of the home as well.

We made a decision to raise the floor of the new extension, so the kitchen is actually about 450 millimetres higher than the previous kitchen and bathroom were.

The second thing it does is pulls us up closer to the light.

The stairs are made from Victorian ash timber, and they wind their way up and around and then arrive in at the edge of the bathroom and the bedroom.

We also decided to place a small window at the top of the stairs so that the staircase would be bathed in really soft, natural light.

The tiles used in the bathroom are a really simple Japanese sugi tile that were actually a wastage product that we found, and they're also repeated down in the laundry as well.

The toilet is tucked away into a timber block.

And the shower sits hidden behind that in a tiled shower niche.

The basin is actually almost like a lab sink, and it sits suspended off the wall with an exposed trap.

We use brass tapware, which has a really beautiful warmth and patina that tends to become more lively and beautiful over time.

The bathroom cabinet is hidden away, and it almost looks like it's part of the wall.

When you push to open it, it reveals the mirror and the storage.

The new window infills the old opening left by the door.

The hidden shower also gets to enjoy this amazing sliver of view across the green roof and to nearby terraces and greenery.

The bottom half is fluted glass, which makes it private but also still brings the light in.

And then the top half is operable so that you can welcome in some natural air.

The main bedroom space is a really simple room with a higher raked ceiling, and it feels even more generous because the bed is quite low in the space.

Beside the bed, Laura and Ammon have installed these incredibly beautiful wall-mounted reading lights so that they can tuck up in bed and enjoy a book.

The wardrobe contains a few different sections.

So there's a section where Laura and Ammon store their shorter and folded clothes, and then a long hanging section.

But that space also functions like their linen cupboard, their garage storing camping gear and things like that.

There's a saying we like to paraphrase at Trias, which is that the greenest building is the one that already exists.

When we're working with existing homes, we have the opportunity to reimagine and reinvent them.

We can keep the character of the places that already exist, and it's almost like we're adding a new chapter in that building's history.

When we're designing small spaces, something we always try and do is really minimise the material palette and the design decisions that we make.

So of course you still want to have light and brightness and air happening in the building, but it's also really important that it doesn't end up being too busy and fussy.

Simplicity is absolutely key, and so making sure that what we choose is really restrained and really calm and uncluttered makes for a far more calm living environment.

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