A ‘perfect’ inner-city pad set on 30 square metres? One architect’s ‘Goldilocks’ rule
From inner-city village to country-town apartments, architect Adam Haddow designs homes that are not too big, not too small – but just right for Australian conditions.
By Luke Slattery
Adam Haddow outside his Robin Boyd Prize-winning Surry Hills home, which is set on a 30-square-metre plot and makes a statement about “using space better”.Credit: Louie Douvis
Six years ago, Adam Haddow began work on a stylish inner-Sydney mash-up of hotel, apartment, office and retail space – but the architect hasn’t, until now, seen his finished creation whole. We meet at the foyer of the Eve Hotel on Wunderlich Lane, the real star of this multi-act show. Dressed in plum-coloured Acne cargo pants with an abundance of blingy zips, Haddow strikes out on a tour of both the building and his thinking.
His eye is drawn to details: the brickwork, lighting and ceramic touches. “Sexy, isn’t it,” he says of a plush penthouse suite in a palette of reddish-brown and eucalyptus-leaf green. I expect to see Austin Powers leap out from the cabinets. “It does have a bit of a ’70s thing,” he agrees. “There’s a bit of my childhood here.”
Over and above the fussy design details – even the cushions are a point of pride – the most pleasing quality is the intangible sum of these well-chosen parts. Haddow describes it as a mood of “welcome, of comfort, as if it’s been here for a long time”. The tranquil tone, surprising in a building aimed in part at celebs and creatives, that will doubtless see a lot of partying, is accented by a network of vaulted, cloister-like corridors.
The Eve Hotel’s foyer, part of Haddow’s Surry Hills Village development.Credit: Anson Smart
The plaudits for Haddow’s Surry Hills Village, realised by property developer TOGA, confirm the 51-year-old’s standing as a leading architectural practitioner. A director of Sydney design firm SJB, and president of the Australian Institute of Architects, he’s also earned a reputation as a disrupter without the disorder. In the next 12 months, he hopes to shift the profession’s focus from the celebration of individual buildings to “design thinking” aimed at “building better places [and communities]”.
Haddow’s Surry Hills Village is composed of three colour-coded blocks: the Eve in clay-red brick; a rectangular block of some 80 private apartments in white brickwork; and an office-retail wing on Cleveland Street in a higgledy-piggledy grey brick. Built over a former car park and supermarket, the village has turned a dreck corner of Redfern into a stylish urban oasis. It’s undoubtedly a “better place”. But is it also an upmarket enclave for people like him?
“Renewal invites people in without excluding them,” he replies in the tone of someone for whom the question is not unexpected. “Gentrification excludes people and replaces them. This project is an interesting one because there was nobody living here. We’ve invited a lot of new people in, but the mixed use – and it’s the most mixed development I’ve ever done – ensures that we haven’t excluded [the area’s existing] residents.”
On an altogether different scale, the architect’s urban ideals are expressed at his nearby Surry Hills home, a sliver of a thing just big enough for two people and a small dog – and 20 guests for a squishy party. The exterior brickwork is rustic at street level, glossy above. Its windows – square, rectangular, round, arched and in one case, blind – are sprinkled about seemingly at random. It steeples to the height of a standard three-level terrace from a tight 30-square-metre plot, like a whimsical Tuscan tower house. There’s really no place like Haddow’s home.
The facade of Haddow’s Surry Hills home comprises a mix of rustic and glossy brickwork.Credit: Anson Smart
And yet for all its endearing playfulness, this is in essence a pragmatic dwelling. It won the 2023 Robin Boyd Prize for residential architecture, Australia’s most prestigious architecture award, not just for its quirky appeal but for the point it makes about design thinking, quite literally, outside the box. In essence, it’s an application of the “Goldilocks principle” – not too big, not too small but just right – to residential architecture. “It’s a hard-working building,” he says as he slides open a custom-made iron security grille with bars as gnarly as tree limbs, and swings open the front door. “And it’s the perfect size.”
From a narrow stairwell – you wouldn’t want to acquire a pot belly – smallish rooms spin off at different heights. The “serving” rooms such as the kitchen and bathroom are smaller; the “served” – bedroom and living room – more spacious. “The house is a statement of intent, for sure, about using space better,” he says when we reach the rooftop garden crowned by a sculptural old bottle tree. “But to some extent I did it for the love of it. The freedom to do what I wanted.”
While teaching architecture criticism at a Sydney university, I invited Haddow to lead a class around his beloved Surry Hills. He threw himself into the role of architecture tour guide, revealing hidden gems such as the 1960s Reader’s Digest HQ: a brutalist masterpiece ornamented with whimsical iron sculptures set into niches on the facade, and a secret rooftop garden. He struck me then, and does now, as a thoroughly urban creature. And yet, his commitment to design as an instrument of social change by some measures, social conservation by others, is by no means restricted to the city. For the past 12 months, his urban ideals have been taking fresh shape in his central Victorian home town.
The architect was raised on the outskirts of Ararat in a humble home built by his father, a school trade teacher, who was posted to the old goldfields district and fell in love with it. When Haddow’s parents reached the age where mobility and access to health services became daily management issues, they moved to a 1950s brick cottage close to the town centre. “When we judged the time was right,” Haddow says, “I redesigned the house.”
‘They could have filled in the spaces with different building types, and in that way avoided chewing up the countryside.’
Adam Haddow
Haddow added two new complementary wings and rethought everything. The result is a dwelling described by Haddow as “small by Australian standards at 150 square metres but completely enough”. Not so much “down-sized”, as “right-sized”.
Next he turned his attention to a big project in the main street of Ararat, which began construction last month. It’s a cluster of restored and reimagined street-front shops and an apartment, as well as two new-build apartments hemming a lane at the rear. The grace note of this urban-country renewal project is a fetching glazed, deep-green handmade brick from Stawell’s third-generation Krause Bricks. The apartments in Ararat will be built on the same principle as his own Surry Hills home, the architect explains. “Only zoomed up a bit to give a bit more extra space. And there’ll be a single car space in Ararat, where here we have none.”
And yet, the pursuit of urban density in a big-sky landscape doesn’t, I suggest, quite square: why build small in a big space?
“I’m a country boy and the focus of my work is on cities,” he replies. “And it might seem something of a paradox to bring the burning issues of the city to the country, but I’m trying to protect the countryside. One of the great joys in a town like Ararat is that you can stand in the main street and see the paddocks. You experience the landscape and sense that you’re in a farming community. All that will be lost if we don’t watch out. And it’s going to be lost not because there was no alternative – there is clearly an alternative in building to a different scale. It’ll be because the alternative that’s been chosen – suburban sprawl in a rural environment – is the quickest and cheapest.”
inside the Ararat house that Haddow redesigned for his parents.Credit: Martina Gemmola
The problem, he insists, is not restricted to his home town. “Several other country towns in Victoria alone have old town centres they’re trying to protect. If you’d driven through Ballarat a decade or more ago, you’d exit the centre of town and you’d see beautiful countryside. Drive that way now, and you’ll see the land has been carved up into shitty housing. Whole suburbs have sprung up. They could have filled in the spaces with different building types, and in that way avoided chewing up the countryside.”
His aim is a variation on the injunction: “Build it and they will come.” Call it, perhaps, build-it-and-they’ll-get-it. “People in my home town have possibly never been into an apartment,” he says. “I want to show the town some different ways of building. That town gave me a lot when I was growing up. My brother and his family still live there. My parents still live there. I want to give something back.”
Haddow is by no means the first to conceive of architecture as an urgent fix for a society tracking off the rails – the profession is rife with social theorists and pseudo-philosophers. His ideas and ideals are not, though, untethered from real-world problems. The home his father built – Haddow’s childhood home – began with a dirt floor. Even when he’s talking big, I sense the ground beneath his feet.
“I’m not interested in an architecture that remains a drawing or an essay,” he tells me. “I’m really only interested in architecture that actually happens. And I want to see architecture students doing stuff rather than only thinking about stuff. Architecture has this inward focus – to many people, it’s a middle-aged white guy with a bow-tie drawing a fancy building. I want it to be more about making places that in turn make our communities better.”
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