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Inside a Sydney sanctuary built ‘upside down and back to front’
It is a bright and unseasonably warm Sydney morning, but inside David Langston-Jones’s recently completed home, the light softens, street noise subsides and a sense of sanctuary prevails. The entryway leads to a bedroom and Langston-Jones’s office, where windows frame a Japanese garden of bamboo and raked gravel.
The home is one of two identical 80 sq metre dwellings that the architect designed on an unwieldy triangular site in Redfern, a neighbourhood on the southern fringe of Sydney’s central business district. Australia is, generally, a land of low-density living, and Langston-Jones could have easily chosen to build a house on a more generous suburban block. But a Hong Kong upbringing instilled in him an appreciation for smaller spaces. “I feel more comfortable in tight, inner-city situations,” he says.
Building in Redfern posed considerable challenges. The neighbourhood has developed haphazardly over the past 150 years and today Victorian terraces, workers’ cottages and public-housing towers jostle for space.
Over the years the local council has imposed stricter planning rules, so while Langston-Jones was permitted to demolish the asbestos-ridden home that occupied the site when he and his partner bought it, the replacement buildings needed to be angled 15 degrees from the street, like other nearby dwellings. A flood plain runs under the site, ruling out a basement, and height restrictions capped the new buildings at two storeys.
Within these parameters, Langston-Jones set about designing a pair of homes — one for him and his partner, and one to lease — that would offer a “comfortable” respite from the “hectic urban context”, he says. “In the end, the constraints of the site dictated the outcome.”
Because the plot sloped 2 metres upwards from the street and could only be minimally excavated, Langston-Jones knew the ground floor would be semi-subterranean and receive limited natural light. As a result, the floor plan of the houses is “upside down and back to front”. At street level, the bedroom and office are sunken, their windowsills level with the back garden. Above, up a wooden staircase, a full-floor living room and kitchen take advantage of the light.
Here, the concrete blockwork has been left unplastered — Langston-Jones says he values “the honest expression of how things are made, because so much of today’s architecture could be made of anything”. A corrugated metal ceiling and studded rubber floor are similarly utilitarian and unadorned. In a far corner, a plain metal staircase leads down to the back garden.
Punctuating these pragmatic material choices are areas of intense colour: painted kitchen joinery and cabinets for a pair of speakers that Langston-Jones inherited from his father, in bright blue, yellow, red and green. Along the back wall is a row of floating wooden cupboards, and behind the dining table hangs a bold geometric artwork by Sydney Ball, all in the same confident tones.
“The use of colour is a camouflage,” Langston-Jones says. “The home is full of bumps and protuberances. The bright colour masks those awkward bits of geometry and gives the illusion that the spaces are smooth and regular.” Sofas by mid-century modernists Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier add to the palette.
Le Corbusier’s primary-colour palette and honest materiality have been a particular influence on his own career, Langston-Jones says, as has the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (“one tries to have the same clarity as the Farnsworth House every time”). But no one has informed his work more than Sir Norman Foster, who gave him his first job after he graduated from London’s Royal College of Art in the mid-1980s. “I learnt a lot of tricks from Norman,” he says, gesturing: “He taught me how to do most of this.”
Langston-Jones worked for Foster from 1987, during which time he served as the project architect on Foster’s own home, a pair of steel and glass pavilions on the top floor of Riverside, the building housing Foster’s practice on the banks of the Thames. In 1990 Langston-Jones emigrated to Australia, initially settling in the northern state of Queensland.
“Australia was the land of opportunity and Queensland was the frontier,” he says. “Every project was a greenfield site. In London, as a young architect striking out solo, you’re lucky if you are asked to build a cupboard for someone.” In 1997, keen to contribute to a more city-centric architectural conversation, he relocated to Sydney and developed a speciality in urban infill projects. “I believe it’s the smallest links in the urban fabric that determine how good that fabric eventually becomes,” he says.
The years Langston-Jones spent in hot and humid Queensland also sharpened his interest in passive-house principles. Australian architecture is notoriously climate-insensitive; with the Redfern houses, Langston-Jones saw an opportunity for a different approach. The concrete blockwork provides a high thermal mass and the homes’ timber-clad facade, with a void between the cladding and the blocks, serves as insulation. “The blocks are never exposed to the sun, so the thermal mass is very stable,” he notes. Upstairs, clerestory windows wrap around the living room, providing light and ventilation while blocking direct sun. So effective is the home’s design that Langston-Jones and his partner decided to forgo air conditioning, generally considered a must-have in Sydney.
Building the homes took 18 months, paused at intervals by excavation discoveries and new council directives. “The challenges of building on a sloping and oddly shaped site meant we essentially proceeded block by concrete block, adjusting the plans as we went,” Langston-Jones says.
The garden came last. The couple is, he admits, not particularly outdoorsy, “so we favoured a garden that was something to look at, rather than something you go into and make use of,” he says. They enlisted landscape architect Shunmyo Masuno — who is also the high priest at the Kenkō-ji Temple in Yokohama — to design the space. (The rental home next door has a more conventional backyard.)
“Staring at a masterful garden like this, you realise that even rocks have souls; they have personality,” Langston-Jones says. “The garden feels like it was here long before the house. This little bit of nature that we have here has become very meaningful to us.”
Before they moved to the area, “we expected chaos,” Langston-Jones laughs. Indeed, sirens blare outside and teenagers on bikes careen around corners. But they also found a sense of community. “Our entire street is linked on WhatsApp,” he says. “I’ve never experienced anything like it. If somebody’s eight-year-old has grown out of their football boots, they’ll offer them to the street, and if the traffic wardens are about, someone will sound the alarm.” It’s a sign, he says, “that we’ve landed in the right place.”
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