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In Sydney, Anthony Gill Architects reads the House next to Taylor Square less as a statement than as a piece of Darlinghurst stitched back into the block, two structures joined loosely around carved courtyards.
The site sits adjacent to Taylor Square, a hard-edged corner of the inner city where Darlinghurst frays into traffic and late-night noise. Anthony Gill Architects takes the position that a house here should continue what is already there rather than announce itself against it. The building is split into two distinct structures with almost no physical connection, each answering the block on its own terms. That refusal to resolve into a single object is the whole argument, and it produces a plan far richer than a tidier one would.
The irregular geometry of the site leaves leftover pockets between the two volumes. Instead of squaring them away, the plan turns them into gardens and courtyards held inside the envelope. One reads as a small jungle: monstera, palms, a brugmansia in flower, all pressing against full-height glass with a red curtain hanging behind. These interstitial rooms pull light and air deep into the plan while keeping the street at arm's length, so the house looks inward across most of its levels.
Material does the heavy lifting. Board-formed concrete carries the ground-floor studio and the main stair, its shuttering grain left legible on wall and soffit, angular where the treads turn. Painted brick, terracotta-red steelwork and a grid of perforated brick voids give the exterior its measure. Inside, the register softens: irregular flagstone underfoot, timber shelves and window seats, a kitchen bench of rose-veined marble, a bathroom lined in pink mosaic tile. Nothing is precious, everything is specific.
The inward focus breaks on the upper living level, where the section finally lifts its eyes. Windows are cut to catch the neighbouring rooftops and, past them, the city and the harbour. A blue-grey steel stair climbs from the flagged terrace to a rooftop garden, the last vantage point in the house. From up there the building stops reading as an object and settles back into the dense, varied grain of the block, which was the point all along.
