How Sydney Adapted a Classic British Terrace House for the Sunshine
The London-style floor plan of Sydney’s terrace houses never made sense for Australia, but this iconic home design has seen a resurgence in popularity.
Sydney's beloved terrace houses were featured in a public art installation by James Voller in 2016.
Photographer: William West/AFP via Getty Images
(This article is part of Bloomberg CityLab’s series exploring the iconic home designs that shaped global cities. Read more from the series. Get the next story sent to your inbox by subscribing to the CityLab Daily newsletter.)
Walk past a row of terrace houses in one of Sydney’s inner suburbs and you can’t miss the feature that sets them apart from their British cousins. In the heat and light of Australia’s east coast, their veranda-like balconies—flush to the face of the building and often decorated with ornate cast-iron balustrades—are multi-functional, shielding each house from the elements and providing its residents with a private patch of outdoor space looking out into the street below. It’s a small but perfect adaptation to fit the Australian context, as useful to the middle-class families and house-sharing students who tend to occupy them now as they were to the workers they were built for a century or more ago.