From "dingy" to designer: What the quintessential Sydney apartment looks like

If you wanted a summary statement of a residential idyll representing the essential Sydney, what would need to be included?

A Victorian lace-balconied terrace? A high position in a varietal neighbourhood overlooking some mandatory red roofs? Living postcard views encompassing the harbour, the bridge and the Opera House?

And for extra effect, the CBD skyline from enough distance so the towers don’t overwhelm. Finally, overhead acres of azure sky.

A lovely renovation project by architect Danny Broe and interior designer Alice Pamment on an almost five-metre-wide 1886 McMahons Point terrace enhanced all of these inherent elements but mostly, by lifting the rear top terrace by 600 millimetres, made a fourth-floor outdoor platform from which to see all of those icons.

Broe says he was given the restoration brief for an internally dingy house that had an evident history of being a divvied-up rooming house and that he found as a time-locked, “cheap” peach-coloured 1980s renovation.

On the pitched site it had the four levels that included a basement, and those potential views at the back that were so hard to access in any comfortable way.

The couple who loved their house, had the luxury of turning one of four possible bedrooms into a walk-in dressing space, and another into a shared study.

In the sub-street-level basement they asked Broe and Pamment to make another sitting room that can work for guest accommodation because it has a bathroom and the large laundry has kitchenette potential.

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The entry level living/dining space with the curving arch and period fireplaces also had an updated kitchen that Broe refitted with new parquetry oak flooring. It used to look directly at an office building but now, through the introduction of Georgian-style exterior mirrors and planter boxes, has become deliciously private.

Hedge plantings on the terrace outside the enviable master bedroom (you can see the icons from the bed), are another aspect of what Broe calls “temporary structures” allowable as strategic alterations to a heritage-protected building.

The most effective move in the project, which he says was really about tasteful, respectful restoration and the introduction of more interior light, was the refinement of the new and now much used fourth-level dormer space and the sensationally “Sydney” four-metre by 7.3-metre deck that sits at the bottom of a wide, handsome flight of travertine-paved steps.

For builder A.S.&K.B Construction, making that terrace was a heroic task as all material had to be taken down or hoicked up four floors.

As Sydney as it is, there is some hint of a French townhouse to a residence that Broe says took on all the new work seamlessly: “All the new touches that make it more usable, more private and nicer to live in.”