2 Ridge Street

The Ridge Street project is an adaptive reuse of a significant and elegant heritage listed commercial terrace. The scope included both a substantial new addition as well as alterations and additions to the existing building fabric within a highly visible and sensitive streetscape. The design explores the potential for using traditional and familiar materials in new and expressive ways that would mediate between residential and urban scales through a dynamic intervention that is both considerate to its context and distinctly contemporary. The Project scope is a result of an innovative brief by an engaged and ambitious client group, all of whom were the heads of an emerging and growing Financial Services company. The client purchased an elegant and locally significant, but dilapidated 2 and 3 level late 19th Century Heritage Terrace to be the headquarters for their executive management team. The building’s location occupies the boundary between the growing urban commercial hub of North Sydney and an adjacent low-rise neighbourhood of two-storey terraces and single-storey housing. The project was a two-stage re-development process. The first stage of redevelopment involved an interior fit-out of the larger three storey portion of the building. Careful and sensitive restoration of existing fabric was undertaken together with spatial replanning and insertion of new joinery elements to enable the functioning of the business. An exhaustive research process extended to identifying the particular mouldings, skirtings, architraves and cornices specific to the original building’s era for areas of restoration. New joinery insertions adopted a consistent, distinct and legible material palette of dark stained timber and bronze, carefully detailed to relate to the existing forms, spaces and details of the original building. The second stage, which followed the client’s successful occupation of the building, sought to maximise the potential of the site and provide for expansion of the growing business. Existing unsympathetic additions had created spaces of limited use and functionality. The proposed design was refined to navigate a challenging and complex approval process and deliver a building of high functionality and contextual sensitivity. Emerging from the greenery of North Sydney’s Ridge Street, the intricate ‘sawtooth’ bond pattern of the brickwork façade provides for a highly dynamic and continually evolving pattern of shadows. The challenges of achieving a non-standard and exploratory solution required a complex design, careful prototyping and a skilled and committed building team. Designed as a simple but distinctly contemporary form, the language of the ‘articulated’ brickwork together with steel framed glazing and aluminium louvres, complements the materiality of the original building. The curved form, scale, and massing respects the adjoining heritage building whilst maintaining privacy for the neighbouring terraces. The outcome simultaneously gives the impression that it has existed for a long time while providing a surprise in its contemporaneity.