Clarion Apartments in Alexandria by SJB.

Clarion by Sydney architecture firm SJB is something of an anomaly. Comprising 18 three-bedroom dwellings, in Sydney’s inner south suburb of Alexandria, the project removed one and two-bed apartments in an effort to eliminate what’s typically seen as investor stock. A bold proposition in a housing market bolstered by speculative investment, the move forms a neighbourhood environment, encouraging residents to really make a home.

The apartments are spread over a western and an eastern building, each with their own lobby. With communal open space shared between the buildings including a gym, pool and sauna as well as generous courtyards and landscaping, a community culture has genuinely been developed. The eastern building is set back 6 metres from the northern boundary, maximising views into the internal courtyards and northerly solar access to apartments.

Designed alongside a broader urban strategy that is restitching the fringe back into the city, the architecture fosters a sense of community and connects its occupants to the embedded culture of the area.

“Alexandria provides a proper mixed-use suburb where you get this great combination of land uses offering a variety of services — it’s diverse and has retained a rich industrial character,” says Adam Haddow, Architect and Director at SJB. “We wanted to add to that with a building that would connect people to one another and to the place and have a longstanding quality that would embed it in that existing fabric.”

A robust and solid façade crafted from scalloped pre-cast concrete with punched openings for windows and balconies takes its cues from warehouse living, for instance.

Broad, sheltered external staircases and oversized landings encourage incidental interactions between neighbours, allowing for passive ventilation and providing leafy views and an ever-present connection to the outdoors as residents move throughout the building. Inside the apartments, concrete ceilings are left raw with the lines of formwork boards creating rhythm and hinting at the quality of construction. While the concrete shell clearly registers light to form pattern and shadow, the velvety finish to the concrete ceilings and burnished terrazzo floors diffuses natural light in a way that softens the interior light quality. Each apartment layout is designed to balance rational construction logic and spatial complexity.

The placement of full-height windows, translucent glass and slotted courtyard spaces plays with perception and extends the limits of the apartments beyond their built envelope. “We thought a lot about the way that cinematographers can communicate the space beyond the frame of the film,” says Haddow. “For example, there could be someone on screen talking and you’d never see the person off-screen that they were talking to but you can sense that they’re there. In a similar way, we’re using architecture to draw people’s perception beyond the immediate space of the apartments and give them a greater sense of space without it necessarily being immediately visible to the eye.”

Details like bronze tapware and oak timber joinery sit in the background of spaces and become part of the fabric of the building alongside fluted glass elements that make subtle references to the external architecture. “The classic modernist apartments that we admire are beautiful because of their simplicity,” says Haddow. They’re very pared back and considered and because of that they have longevity.”

The restraint in this approach is tempered by deliberate moments of luxury – an island bench carved from green-veined marble, freestanding fireplaces in each apartment and oversized glass doors and windows that connect to the outdoors.

Related: SJB’s Sydney Studio Refurbishment in Surry Hills.

[Images courtesy of SJB. Exterior photography by Brett Boardman. Interior photography by Anson Smart.]