Stanic Harding

Most Sydney apartment buildings within sight of the harbour – and this is truer the more recently the building was designed – take pains to seize any view of the Bridge, Opera House, or the city proper. Indeed, some apartments are wildly contorted in aiming for maximum exposure in the direction of the city, so that every possible sliver of lucrative view is framed, and the neighbouring towers carefully hidden.

This was not so with Darling Point Apartment 2 – at least before Stanic Harding got to it. According to the RAIA jury which declared the architects winners of the 2008 Interior Architecture award, the building’s layout was previously like “a literal square peg in a round hole”: clumsily occupying the entire 16th floor of a circular 18 storey building. It failed to take full advantage of the floor’s potential 360 degree view. Stanic Harding’s newly designed apartment does exactly this and more, turning the previously boxy layout into a single flowing, curving space with slideaway doors, where changes in program are subtly suggested by joinery, mirrors, and partitions without breaking the sense of continuity.

The apartment was first stripped to its structure, its surfaces made good, ready to be rebuilt with a minimal but definitely contemporary atmosphere. In any architecture that is modernist or minimalist in character, the quality of the architect’s detailing can make or break a project. In this case, it’s the former. The meticulous attention to detail that has gone into the joinery and its integration into architectural space is surely one of the apartment’s most salient features.

Both the architects and the RAIA jury agree; in a way the apartment feels much like a yacht. Its clean, slick surfaces and definite radial character suggest luxury without opulence, and an openness to the view which is yet punctuated with pockets of secluded, inward looking space. It maintains a degree of uniformity in that each room expands from the curved core to meet the like-wise curved glazed exterior, but any monotony is broken up by the sensitive and pared back detailing by the LED strip lights vertically built into the joinery, by the white fluorescent lines of the main lighting which radiates out from the core, or by the reflected views framed by mirrors.

The mirrors and the consistent colour palette also make the space adaptable; to both the inhabitant and time of day. The apartment is a different place at night, in the light of the city and highlighted by the LED strips, as it is in day-time, awash with sunlight. This changeability is heightened by the feeling of continuity provided by the freeflowing plan, made possible by doors which slide into the joinery, and by using subtle curves and softened edges rather than walls or orthogonal divisions.

The new apartment design is minimal, ubiquitously curved, and in a way even straightforward, in that its design in plan is so clearly guided by the desire to secure a 360 degree view and abundant daylight. Yet it possesses an air of contemporary sophistication which creates interest in an otherwise very muted space, and a sensitivity to the changes in the program of each room which prevents the apartment design from being in any way obvious or simplistic. In achieving this effect, Stanic Harding’s rigourous attention to detailing was critical. +

1 The form and framing of the balcony has the effect of foreshortening the city view.. 2 Stanic Harding addressed adeptly the floorplan challenges posed by a circular floorplate and core. 3 Being so open to the harbour and surrounding view, the character of the apartment changes dramatically
depending on the time of day. 4 Sparingly applied are contemporary embellishments; the LED strip lighting spills colour into an otherwise minimalist white space. 5 Even in the kitchen the view is not sacrificed; the cabinetry becoming a frame rather than an obstruction.

PHOTOGRAPHY by Paul Gosney, Guiseppe Matteo Pappalardo (Stylist)