Architect Dad Transforms Son’s Small Sydney Apartment, 50sqm-538sqft

Simplicity is something that I strive for. So it's a process of finding the most simple, practical, and high-performance solution. So in a small space, that becomes very important because there's no room for extravagance. There's no room for excess. There is a need to make the space livable and delightful. I'm Ed Lipman. I'm the founder of Lipman Partnership. And Mitch, my son, asked me to help him renovate his apartment. The apartment is in Darlinghurst, which is an inner-city part of Sydney. It's a dense, populated neighborhood, close to restaurants and shops, and very close to the central business district. Mitch, his brief was, you know, he's a chef, so he wanted a good kitchen, and he wanted this mezzanine bed. And the other requirement that he insisted on was that this should be good enough to appear on Never Too Small. Luckily, I satisfied the brief. This building was originally a Reader's Digest warehouse. It was converted into a residential apartment building 50 years later. That's why it's as high as it is, 3.6-meter ceiling. The goal of the design was to do more with less. We used a lot of timber because it's a sustainable material. It smells nice. So we just wanted to keep the palette very simple. Originally, when we first saw the apartment, it was pokey and dark. The light fittings were pretty ugly. The bed was in a room. The kitchen was a galley kitchen. There was an island, which made the space a bit smaller. In terms of the layout of the space, it's not very different to what was here before, but the major move that we made, we elevated the loft so that the space below the bed was usable. Around the perimeter of that undercroft, there's clothing, wardrobe, and a desk, which has a window. The bedroom overlooks the living room, so that's very grand and luxurious. Japan, it's a delicious puzzle of contradictions. So delicious, in fact, that we've dedicated an entire issue of our magazine to it. But this is not the Japan you might expect. In issue three, we go beyond the Golden Turd to explore the art of bending space and light with architect Takeshi Hosaka and Paul Smith's 40-plus-year love affair with Japan. We ask how legendary product designer Naoto Fukasawa finds the essence of an object while also celebrating the Japanese-born art form of chindogu, that is, designing almost useless gadgets. And of course, there are new compact Japanese small homes to fall in love with, too. There's so much more inside, including a double-sided pull-out poster featuring original artwork and a city guide curated by creative Tokyo locals. Subscribe now to get yours with free worldwide shipping. When you come through the front door, you walk through the storage wall. There is a sort of a sense of arrival. With the bathroom on the right, the loft bedroom up the stairs right there, entrance to the study, wardrobe, and the living room. It's a couple of steps away, there's space for shoes. The original floor was a vinyl floating floor, and we put down a new timber floor, which is similar to the joinery. There's really only one material that we've used in this apartment, and that's timber. I try to always get the lines working through a piece of joinery, try to integrate the horizontal lines. It's a purely visual thing. I think it adds some beauty. It was really important that that storage wall and the kitchen incorporates not just the kitchen, but also storage area. And then taking the joinery up to the ceiling. There are things that you may not need to get access to every day of the week, and so I make use of that space. The joinery is new, and as you can imagine, a whole building like this, the floor's not level, the ceiling's not level. It's gotta be custom designed and gotta make allowances for all these. Defects in the old building. The mirrored splashback is a good idea in a small space, so that when you've got your back to your guests, you can still see them, and it also makes the room feel bigger. The stainless steel bench, given the fact that Mitch is a chef, that's what he's accustomed to. The fridge was here before. The gas cooktop was being thrown out by a friend of mine who was renovating his apartment. It's much more practical to have deep, wide drawers. Easier to get into the back of them, and it's also more practical to have one wide drawer than two narrow drawers. Mitch, he found the table nearby and lugged it in with the help of a friend, I think. The chairs were also secondhand. The aluminium uplight is part of the lighting strategy for the whole apartment. It's throwing light up to create a greater sense of space. It takes your eye through the space. It's parallel to the joinery, so that it's kind of part of that service zone. The living area has been stripped back to its basics, so you can see the original structure. There are some beams in the space supporting the slab above, and the walls were as we found them. The living area talks to the bed loft, so you can sit up there and engage in what's happening down here. All the furniture was Mitch's doing. It's all secondhand. He got it off Marketplace, and it's quite eclectic. The apartment is suitable for flexibility. The choice of white is really just to make the space feel bigger. In a small apartment like this, our approach was just to keep it all very simple and to create the warmth with the timber. There's shelving between the living room and the study. It creates that permeability and transparency through the space. Because the bed itself is elevated, there's sufficient headroom to walk under the mattress. It was a good use of space because it increased the usable floor area. On one side of the dressing area, there's hanging space to create flexibility and transparency. The wardrobe space is not completely separated from the living room. So there's a timber screen, so you can get a sense that there's a room behind there. On the other side of the room, underneath the stairs are storage cubicles, space for shoes, jumpers, and knitwear. No space is wasted. In the study area, once you're seated, you're in a nice, cosy space, which reminds me of a caravan or a boat. It's another experience within the apartment. The bathroom hasn't been renovated yet, but it will be. The bathroom is functional as it is. There's a small bathtub, a shower, a washer, dryer, a hand basin with some storage and a toilet. The mattress is raised above the platform for two reasons. Firstly, to make it easier to get into bed. And secondly, to create headroom in the space below. It's all made out of plywood. The floor, the bed base, the cupboards below, it's all one material. And it was made in the joiner's workshop and then brought here and assembled in pieces. We wanted to combine the bedroom loft with the living space. We needed some barrier to prevent an accident. We put some big timber shelves, which also act as a desk, so you can sit on the floor of the bed loft and dangle your feet and write your memoirs or read a book. It also creates a screen between the bed loft and the living room. The existing window was integrated with the platform. The platform doesn't actually meet the window. And the good thing about that is that it allows light through to the desk below. The approach to this project is to make things practical and liveable and enjoyable to live in. So in a very small space like this, one has to work a bit harder. It's a place for one person or maybe a partner. So you don't really need to worry about privacy. Without those requirements, the space becomes much more luxurious because it's one big volume. Rather than demolishing a building like this and building a new residential flat building, it's more sustainable to actually convert buildings like this for new use. If you're an architect or designer with a project we could feature, please share it with us at nevertosmall.com slash submissions.