Making light of long views

One Paddington terrace has been redesigned to take advantage of every inch of space and celebrate its sun-drenched courtyard.

Remodelling the narrow tunnel-house terraces of old Sydney to become light and apparently very roomy - more spacious even than many later model detached houses in the suburbs - takes shrewd design strategies that Alec Tzannes, of Tzannes Associates, says rely on capturing some critical qualities.

"Access to light and air, and long internal vistas that will make space feel more generous and expansive," she says.

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In rebuilding a corner Paddington terrace - on a wedged block with three lane frontages - to make four bedrooms and a high degree of polished sophistication, Tzannes reckons "it's extraordinary to be able to boast of a corridor vista that is 32 metres long".

That's the effect of "planning all rooms around the open space of the courtyard and of dissolving the sense of small, individual rooms by giving them stackable or slide-away cavity doors that [when open] can make all the rooms feel as if they are one contiguous space.

"In these small, long houses you cannot waste space."

That's an effect, too, of generating an extra, airy dimension of verticality that arises in the new, spotted gum-timbered stairwell that floats up through three levels - from the media room in the stone basement to the first-floor bedrooms - and then capping it with a great big skylight.

"I don't like houses where you have to switch on lights during the day," Tzannes says. "Here, we can bring light from the sky right through the house."

All but the new rear wing, which has accommodated a two-car garage above the courtyard sitting room because of the land-rise, occupies the footprint of the old dwelling that had such shoddy 1970s additions.

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Making light of long views