Erskineville is already a suburb that rewards people who are comfortable with compact. This particular terrace takes compact and makes it a personality trait. At 3.4 metres wide, the floorplan is less a rectangle and more an extended corridor with ambitions, and the agent’s description of ‘separate living, dining and kitchen’ is doing some of the heaviest lifting in recent NSW real estate history.
What the width taketh away, the renovation giveth back. The original Victorian bones — exposed sandstock brick, timber floors, a proper arched hallway — have been kept and built around rather than buried under plasterboard. A skylight runs the length of the hall, flooding the whole narrow run with light, which is either excellent architecture or a very clever trick to stop the walls feeling quite so close together. Probably both.
The rear is where the house quietly becomes something else. A decked pergola with a glass roof opens the whole back end up, with a garden that has managed to fit in raised vegetable beds, actual grass, a monstera, and several palms — a small miracle of spatial efficiency that the kitchen, with its timber benchtops and grey checkerboard tiles, would appreciate.
But the reason we’re here — the detail that earned it a spot on The P List without further deliberation — is the side passage. Wedged between the brick wall and the Colorbond fence, where most terraces keep the recycling bins and garden tools, someone has installed a freestanding clawfoot bath. Outside. Green on the outside, white on the inside, surrounded by lush tropical growth, with what appears to be a working tap. We have questions. We have mostly made peace with never getting answers. We think it’s brilliant.
It sold, obviously. In Erskineville, anything this characterful with train access from two stations and Sydney Park around the corner was never going to last long. The outdoor bath presumably went with it.
