Laneway Glass House: The project hidden in an unloved Darlinghurst street

For five years, Sydney architect Brad Swartz and industrial designer Henry Wilson collaborated on a luminous laneway home that punches well above its modest footprint.

Hovering at the fringe between the public and private domain, the project cleverly converts the rear lane parking of an existing terrace house into a new home, offering a blueprint for urban infill housing.

The finely tuned design response harnesses light, offers privacy and reflects the pared-back aesthetic of its occupant – the industrial designer himself.

The pair initially met socially through a mutual friend.

“Through serendipitous timing, Wilson set up a shared office in his terrace as we needed some desks,” says Swartz, who heads his eponymous practice Brad Swartz Architects.

“I was living up the road and jumped at the opportunity to share with him and be able to roll down the hill to work.”

When Wilson decided to kick off the project, Swartz was the natural fit for the collaboration.

“Our ideas were floated and discussed informally, without strict presentations of more resolved ideas for a client to review,” Swartz says.

“This wasn’t your typical ‘client-architect’ relationship,” Wilson adds. “We worked on it as an aside from our studio practices and felt it was a unique job for us both.”

Click to open gallery

Combining a work studio at ground level and a two-bedroom home above, the new building rises to the challenge to maximise the narrow block on a gritty urban laneway.

“This seemingly simple brief understates the complexity of trying to achieve all this on a narrow 56-square-metre rear-lane site,” Swartz says.

Undoubtedly the hero of the project is the translucent facade reminiscent of Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet’s famed 1930s Maison de Verre in Paris.

“The use of glass blocks on the west-facing laneway boundary allows the house to harness light while maintaining complete privacy,” Swartz explains.

“The ever-changing light creates a sense of calm throughout the day – you almost forget where you are.”

Own a home?

Follow it on Domain for Owners to see what it might be worth.

See demand for your home

In addition, the compact home managed to deliver on volume, thanks to its four-metre ceilings and gracious junctions between rounded wall cornices and ceilings that blur the delineation between the two – a detail Henry refers to as being “James Turrell-like”.

Another nod to the arts is the centrally located Richard Serra-inspired precast concrete spiral staircase that rises like a functional sculpture to connect the three levels.

Not only magnificent in appearance, the stair’s spiral shape is responsible for reducing dedicated circulation space to a bare minimum – critical for compact footprints such as this.

As a long-term collector, many of Wilson’s home’s furnishings are either vintage, prototypes in development or pieces from his label. The office is almost exclusively kitted out with Laker, his new brand created in collaboration with David Caon.

“Upstairs, there is a lot of Carlo Scarpa lighting, a mix of different objects or trades with artist friends – it’s a real mismatch of things I’ve collected over the years,” Wilson says.

“[This house] was always meant to be a bit of a gallery space for me to do shoots and display things.

“I’m most proud of the fact this house sits on a pretty unloved laneway in Darlinghurst.

“The council and all the planners were expecting a very drab, brutal type of building to arise – not the kind of lantern we’ve created.

“I really wanted to surprise people if they are wandering around those streets – a glowing jewel in grime and graffiti-covered back laneway.”