Inside Architect's Small Sydney Home (Home and Studio Tour)

G'day, the site. My name's Adam Haddo. I'm the immediate past president of the Australian Institute of Architects and a partner at SJB. Welcome to my home. We've lived here for about three years now. We found the site on a weekend we were walking through Surrey Hills. So, my husband was like, oh, we could buy that house. It was for sale. It had been for sale forever. I was like, there's no way we're buying that house. That is a shithole of a house. Like, we're not buying it. I went home and did some drawings and I was actually like, actually, Mike, we should buy this house because there's a bit of land at the back. And so, the house sits on 30 square meters of land, which is just bigger than a car space. So, it's pretty small. It took about four months to get approval. It was pretty quick. And then, about 18 months to build. I think the thing I love most about the house is the intimacy of it, the tightness. There's something nice about living close to your partner. I think that's pretty fun. I don't know that there's anything I'd do different, to be honest. It fits us, the house. It's kind of nothing more than we need. Australia has some of the biggest houses in the world. Like, the average house, I think, in Australia is about 240 square meters. Whereas, the average house size in the UK is about 70. So, this house is 67 square meters internally. So, it's pretty small. It's about the same size as a small two-bedroom apartment. So, the inspiration was to see, could we make something to show people that actually it's possible that you don't need a big house to live in Australia. You can have a small house. There's something quite amazing about having everything at your fingertips. You can walk everywhere. I never have to get in a car. You know, we're two blocks from the metro station, two blocks from Central Station, 20-minute walk to the Opera House, two-minute walk to my office. So, sometimes you think if you're living in a big city, it's hard to live local, but actually, it's pretty easy to live local if you live and work in the same spot. The only thing went wrong with the project, we had commissioned this painting. It's by Nicholas Harding. Imagining what this place was before White Settlement. It was finished before the house was finished. So, he entered it into the win prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Actually won the win prize, but I accidentally made the room too small. So, that painting was finished before the house. So, I actually had to, there was a wall, this wall was in here and I had to demolish the wall and move it out so that the painting could fit. So, that's a little bit maybe of my dyslexia coming into my job, which I have to manage. But anyway, the builder wasn't particularly happy about demolishing the wall, but the painting fits, so that's pretty nice. The house is so small that there's only like three or four pieces of furniture. Everything else is built in. We built in the couch and I wasn't really sure what I wanted. So, I went down to Cardabat to do my lunch break. I was talking to the staff there and I said I needed to go with a painting and she was kind of a little bit annoyed with me because I hadn't made an appointment to go and see them. But I showed the painting and as soon as I showed the painting, actually, she burst out crying. And I was like, what are you crying for? And she's like, I love that painting. I saw it at the Art Gallery of New South Wales during the exhibition for the Wynn Prize. She was like, I know exactly the fabric you want and it was this gold corduroy. I was like, why would you not love gold corduroy? So, the velvet of the corduroy is probably one of my favourite things and it's almost like the honeypot of the house. It's a pot where people come and sit and you can spend kind of hours here in the sun just enjoying the house. My morning routine is I go to the gym. My gym, you can actually see into my gym from here, which is kind of nice. Yeah, so I go to the gym, I come home, grab a coffee around the corner with my husband and make breakfast. The kitchen is pretty small. I actually designed the taps for the house. The idea is that it's a bird sitting on the edge of a birdbath and they're meant to be kind of taps that are easy to turn on and off. We've designed them so you can have marble or timber or recycled material on them. We worked with Parisi to design those taps. Yeah, they might come to the market sometime soon. We'll see what happens. Anyway, the kitchen's pretty small. Mike's the cook in our family, so I don't do any cooking. In fact, I'm not really allowed in this room. It's his space. He's a great cook. I'm a really awful cook, so that's why I'm letting him in. One of the details I really love in the house is the handrail. The team at John Hyde did it for us, but it's just wrapped leather. I wanted it to be like one of those really beautiful early Jaguar cars, the handrails. So it's a really thin bit of leather that's wrapped around and I like the detail as it comes to the balustrade and they've just used copper wire to kind of bridge that. So anyway, it's beautiful because every time you hold it, you feel the warmth and actually over time, you can see the linen in your hands is chaining the leather. So the stair is the spine of the house. It actually acts as a Catherine wheel, so rooms come off the house at landings and that's because on one side of the house, it's the service spaces and the other side of the house, it's the service spaces. So the service spaces have really low ceilings, 2.1 meters and the served spaces have big volumes. So that's the bedroom, the living room and the study and then the kitchen, the storeroom, this bathroom and the en suite are all quite short. And so from here, we put this mirrored ceiling, mirrored kind of circle, which lets you look up and see down to the street, but also hides the track for the sliding door because I forgot to recess it into the ceiling. So this is the bedroom. We've got an east facing half moon window, which is about light coming in the morning and just enjoying that waking of the day. But this is Eric's little window. So Eric's the dog, he's a Yorkshire Terrier and we've got a window low enough that he can sit on the floor and see out and what's happening in the street and that he actually does it, he loves it actually. It's a shame he's not here. I know. This is the robe, I love a bit of color. So this is a room that's flooded in color. It's like a beautiful lipstick pink is really the color it's called. It's warm, inviting space, and there's a lot of mirror. So it makes the room feel a lot bigger than it actually is. Part of the daily routine is showering. And I think showering should be one of the most joyful parts of the day. So this is the spot where we connect you to the sky. It's about getting the light from above and also just being able to understand what the day's doing. So when you're having a shower, you can kind of work out, oh, what am I gonna wear and what's going on in the day? It's a kind of a moment of reflection and pause and bringing the garden in just means you're a little bit closer to nature. This part of the project is obviously the rooftop. It's kind of a part of a bigger project for us. We did the building just over here on Faveau Street, which has a roof garden. And obviously there's a roof garden here. We're working on the Reader's Digest building, which is just across there, which has a roof garden. And then we've completed some more roof gardens further down on Cleveland Street. And it's about trying to get some greenery back into the city and to support our animals, really, insects and birds. And, you know, we get lizards up here, which I think that's a remarkable, but actually we never put a lizard here, but I find lizards on the rooftop. So it's pretty nice that actually the wildlife come back to the city if you give them the opportunity. So we have three outdoor cooking spots in the house. One down at the living room level, which is a barbecue. Have the green egg here and we have the pizza oven. Mike loves cooking. And so the green egg, particularly, you can cook food over a 12-hour period. And actually the nice thing about it being here and the nice thing about the chimney for the fireplace is actually that the grass tree, for it to flower, it needs smoke. It's part of like burning culture in Australian Indigenous history and culture. The smoke from the fire and the smoke from the green egg actually help the grass tree to flower every year. The gate here is actually made by Mika Popoputsen. Mika's an artist and a really great friend. And during COVID, he was like, I've got nothing to do. And I'm like, make a gate. I always knew he wanted this shape gate, but he made this gate out of bronze. So it's cast in manly and it's beautiful vines, I suppose. So it's this kind of idea that the gate's coming alive and there's these handles designed into it. So the nice thing over time is just seeing the patina happen from the handles. The facade itself is a brick facade by Krauss Bricks. And actually the bricks were rejected. They were meant to be for the Phoenix projects down by Wardle and DBJ. They didn't quite like the colour. So they went back and actually Krauss Bricks are from where I grew up, a little town in Western District of Victoria called Stawell. I grew up in Ararat, which is next door. I like specifying things from people I know. Clinton Krauss from Krauss has become a friend. Anyway, the bricks came up to Sydney. They got rejected. They went back to Stawell. They came back again to be used for the house. And so the broken bricks that happened in transit, we just turned on edge and they became the base of the building, which aligned with the sandstone of the heritage building next door. So this idea of a solid base and then a more finished upper. The detailing in the brick is that we've raked the horizontal joints and done a flush vertical. It's a Frank Lloyd Wright detail actually. And it's to make the house feel a little bit shorter, a bit longer. So it kind of draws out the horizontal in it. I have a really long commute to the office of three minutes. So let's head to the office. I mean, we've had our office here for 26 years, right? And when we first came to Surry Hills, it wasn't very nice. Like the two, Bourke Street and Crown Street then were one way, three ways in and out of the city to the airport. It was so bad. The city's made huge investments in terms of like the Surry Hills library, the new street layouts. It's pretty good. This is the Reader's Digest building. It was designed by John James and it was originally for Reader's Digest. And it actually was just a big building for a computer and printing press. That's all it was used for really and some offices on the top. So the offices on the top actually have this amazing internal garden, like a massive roof garden. It's probably one of the most beautiful places you've ever been to. When Reader's Digest moved out, obviously when you take the printing press and the computer out, it's a lot of dark space. So we're working as the interior architects for the project to turn it into office space. Designed five of the architectural heritage artifacts and they're making some new openings for the outside walls. And we're working on the interior through the architectural building. There's a whole lot of art pieces you can see in the base of the building. And actually when they were finished and installed, the global CEO of Reader's Digest came out to Australia and he hated them. So he had them removed from the building. No one ever really knew where they were, but we found them in the basement. So they're gonna be restored and reinstalled, which is really amazing to be able to do that. You can see the new windows that the architects have put in to help get light into the space. And then you can see the terraces of the old levels above where the executive offices used to be. This will actually be a new cafe. So this roller door, which used to be the loading dock, gets opened up and there'll be a new cafe in there and one of the main entry points into the building. And there'll be a big void that runs through it. And we kind of imagine this as being Surry Hills Town Hall. So there's no Town Hall in Surry Hills. So given the creative nature of Surry Hills as a place, putting a Town Hall here with a big open space, people to have lectures and talks and exhibitions, that's kind of what it's gonna be. I don't usually take this train, I take the one over. How are you? Good, how are you? Good, good. Let's have my normal. There you go. I live the type of life I wanna live in the sense that I like the idea that you can live in a small footprint of a city that you don't have to go very far. So, I mean, in an ideal world, everyone would live in 15 minutes where they work. I know that's not possible for everyone, but I'm really lucky that I can do that. So this is my office. I've got a supermarket, coffee shops, hairdressers, the office and the house. So it's pretty nice to be able to live a life where you can walk everywhere. I kind of make that a point in my life to try and do that so that I don't have to drive a car, to be honest. I like being able to get on a train to go to places or walk to the city. So yeah, it's a pretty nice way to live. So welcome to SJB. This is where we work. Front desk, and this is Paula. Say hello, Paula. Give her a wave. We're over two floors. We have our planners at this level, and then we have our staff room here, which is about everyone coming together, having lunch, talks. It's also where we have our materials library so that it's kind of quite front and center. And we have outdoor space so that we can have Friday night drinks out there. We also have models dotted around the office. So that model there is a facade model for a building we're doing in Kent Street, which is a 22-story public art piece, ultimately. And then models like this. We have a model shop up at Brookvale. So we have three full-time model makers who help us making all different types of models from concept models through to models for approval through to final things and prototypes like that one there. So a bit of diversity. So yeah, so this is the staff space. Great views out over Sydney. You can see the SFS, the Sydney Football Ground, Cricket Ground, and then downstairs to the main office space. So down the space, you can probably see there's a bit of similarity between my house and here, the dark, rich colors, which is all about expansion and compression. So compress you in the stairs, make it a little bit dark and moody, and then open up into the office space. That's the studio. We have good access to outdoor space across the office. Again, more samples, more models. Morning, how are you? Spaces to present in. Morning. How are you, peeps? You good? Good? Ah, hello. Hello. How are you? We have lots of dogs in the office. He loves it. He's a star. That's Buddy. We come through to what we call the Redfern end of the office. This is my desk. It's super messy, my God. It's embarrassingly messy, to be honest. But yeah, this is where I sit. So I get a bit of natural light, some bookshelves, a spot to sit amongst the other directors, a nice spot here to just sit and have discussions and lots of pin-up rules. So we do lots of design reviews here to be able to talk to everybody about what's going on in projects. We come through into the back end of the office. Again, more models. So like city-scale models where we're testing things, looking at all the different options for buildings. And we're just about to demolish those walls, actually. So the office is getting bigger and it's going to open out towards the outdoor deck. So I've actually never worked anywhere else. 1994, I started at SJB in Melbourne. I just never left, to be honest. So I finished university and started working in the Melbourne office full-time. And we actually won a competition to do a project. So I moved to Sydney to do the project. So I came up here for two weeks in 2000, just before the Olympics. And my mum still asks me if I'm moving back to Victoria, which I'm not, 26 years later. So yeah, so we were two people in the office then. There was just two of us. So now we're a staff of about 120. The thing I like most about the practice is the multidisciplinary nature of it. So we have planners, urban designers, interior designers, and architects. And that, for me, means that you get a really interesting group of people together who think differently about the same challenge, right? And so the kind of nice thing about that is no project is the same. The line of sight through a project changes and you get a difference in the outcomes, which is based on the people who are involved. I kind of love that. So having a year out, I think is a really important part of the degree for me, at least. It was an opportunity to take the first three years of the degree and consolidate that and understand, did I really want to be an architect? And actually, a lot of people left architecture after that year off, because they got into the profession and they were like, actually, this is not really what I want to do. So I think it's nice to know that before you've done six years. Would you bring it back? 100%, it should be compulsory. Architecture can become too theoretical if you don't step outside the boundaries of academia. And ultimately, you can draw all the drawings you want, but actually, architecture is about getting things built. So I think it's a really important thing to start early in your career. And I encourage all of our staff who come as students who are working to take time off and go and travel and see what's going on and work at different places. And hopefully they come back. It's nice if they go and do a bit of work somewhere else. Yeah, so SJB was started by S and J and B. So Sim and Justin Bialik. They were three children of Holocaust survivors. So they all arrived in Melbourne and built their own lives and they started the practice. And actually the practice was not only the three partners, but it was also their wives. So there was kind of six people working in the practice to make the practice good. You know, growing up in the country, coming out as gay and being accepted by them was a really powerful thing, I think. And that level of acceptance from the SJ and B, I think was what really underpins the culture of practice that actually everyone's invited, everyone's welcome and people's voices are heard. For me, that kind of fundamental cultural backbone of the business is why I've never left, why I've been here for 30 something years. What's it like to work at SJB? I think the thing that we try to make sure is that it's joyful. You know, you have a choice in life. Everything is a choice. And actually we want you to choose to come to work and enjoy it. To make that happen, we want to create an environment which is about being authentic to yourself. So bringing your whole self to the office and enjoying what you do and making sure that we can find spots in the office for you to enjoy what you want to do. I think it's important that we don't think of the design profession, architecture, interiors, urban design as being a single thing. That actually there are different people with different opinions and different areas of interest and different strengths and weaknesses and actually finding the strengths for them in the office space, studio space is really important and letting them shine is what I want it to be. Should be joyful, should laugh at work, you should enjoy the people around you, should enjoy the projects, you should grow and hopefully as an office, we're able to help in that process. Thanks for dropping in. It was a blast. I hope you enjoyed it. I've got to go and do some work. So you have to go away now.