A Mirrored Kitchen Makes This Very Narrow Sydney Terrace Home Feel Much Larger Than It Is

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Project Details:

Location: Bondi Junction, Sydney, Australia

Architect: Studio Carson Kelly / @studiocarsonkelly

Footprint: 1,023 square feet

Builder: First Grade

Photographer: Dina Grinberg / @dinagrinberg_

From the Architect: "For a year, the principals of Studio Carson Kelly—architect Klaus and creative director Nicholas—lived in the house as they redesigned it, studying its light, its failures, and its latent capacity before submitting a fresh scheme for approval. That period of occupation is embedded in the outcome. The planning reflects a close understanding of how a house of this scale can sustain daily life without expansion—a compression of circulation achieved through spatial logic rather than sacrifice. A dog-legged stair performs double duty as both movement and infrastructure, integrating the laundry within its form and resolving into a compact landing from which each bedroom on the first floor level occupies the full boundary-to-boundary width of the site. Redundant corridors are removed; movement is folded back into the architecture itself.

"The roof became the primary surface for introducing daylight. A series of skylights—including a boundary-to-boundary skylight at the center of the plan—draw light deep into the section, allowing it to move and shift throughout the day in a house that might otherwise read as dark and compressed. Clerestory glazing extends this vertical distribution further.

"Material selection is structured around contrast as a way of giving each zone its own register while maintaining coherence across the whole. A custom elongated brick format carries the exterior language inward, appearing underfoot in the courtyard, rising into built-in seating, and forming the enclosing walls of key interior spaces. Its recurrence across these thresholds dissolves the boundary between inside and out, allowing the courtyard to extend the living zone without additional area. At the lower level, a patchwork terrazzo field operates as a composed surface that catches light and shifts in tone across the day, anchoring the space with a quality closer to permanence than finish.

"The kitchen is conceived as a sequence of interconnected zones. Mirrored joinery defines the primary storage wall, amplifying light and extending sight lines to work against the house's narrow dimension. Intersecting this is a stainless-steel working zone whose reflective quality ties it back to the mirrored elements and maintains a coherent visual language across the space. A floating stone slab, pulled off the perimeter to allow full circulation, operates simultaneously as dining table, island, and social anchor—consolidating functions into a single monolithic object and allowing the kitchen to remain open and flexible across different modes of use.

"The bathrooms shift into a more immersive material register. Stone is handled as an enveloping surface rather than an applied finish, wrapped and varied in scale across mosaic, elongated formats, and larger slabs. Glass brick introduces a softer atmospheric layer in the primary bedroom within the otherwise rectilinear geometry: a circular aperture formed from square units that reads as a moment of visual relief within the ordered framework, filtering light into a diffused glow while obscuring sight lines with depth and texture. The primary ensuite carries this furthest—a generous shower volume set beneath a full skylight that opens directly to sky and tree canopy above."