The transformation of a 'poorly planned penthouse' in Surry Hills

A Frenchwoman and her partner, a New Yorker, have one of those lifestyles where they get to live and work in exciting capitals around the globe.

For their current “Sydney chapter”, a house was preferred but confronting the affordability chasm of one of the world’s most expensive cities for property, they opted instead for a Surry Hills apartment.

On the 18th floor of what architect Daniel Stukel Beasly of Stukel Stone says was “a mediocre ’90s building”, the couple discovered “a poorly planned penthouse with a private 70-square-metre roof terrace”.

The north/south two-bedroom apartment, says Beasly, “sees the city and gets amazing sunsets”. But before encouraging his potential clients to sink money into a strip-out and reconfigure renovation, he advised them to check the worth of the exercise with a local real estate agent. They got the thumbs up.

With the architect and his practice co-designer Tobhiya Stone Feller responding to the brief for a very sociable, even “bar like” home, with proper cooking amenity, the main priority was to open the apartment to that sky patio and internally “to allow for good circulation for the human body to get around in”.

As with all apartment reboots, the designers had to factor in the set points of essential structural supports and services. “Waste, water, plumbing and fire-service shafts.”

As determining as fixed elements can be, Beasly says he prefers “plotting around them and figuring out how people would move through the space, than coming up with a layout on a blank page”.

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The built response is one very interesting apartment with original joinery installations and one freestanding piece in particular (around the fire-pump shaft) that allows for storage, seating, lighting, bar facilities and a bag drop-off shelf. “Everyone needs a bag-dump place.

“It’s in a non-bonded central space that’s an extension of the kitchen. It’s a conversation place that’s almost a diagram of circulation in an open plan apartment.”

The kitchen benches are generous and have a mixed materiality of stainless steel, man-made stone and a slab of marble at the eating place. Marble “because a wine glass sounds really good on marble and it’s perfect for making pastry”.

The backdrop to the innovative new fit-out hints of an industrial aesthetic, yet it wasn’t an aim. “We suggested stripping off the plaster and exposing the concrete form of a very poorly constructed building.

“The clients were brave enough to do it and the industrial does pull it away from being sweet and comfortable to make it more like a commercial bar”.

Beasly believes apartment adaptations will make up more architecture work in the near future, especially in Sydney, “because there is going to be a real need for it”.