Ferry Road in Glebe is lined with well-behaved Federation terraces — iron lace, hedges, the odd sandstone retaining wall — which is exactly what makes number 38 look like it wandered in from a different suburb entirely. The owners bulldozed the original cottage on their 374sqm block and handed the whole thing to Chenchow Little, architects who apparently do not know how to design the same house twice. What came back in 2019 promptly won the 2020 Wilkinson Award for Residential Architecture. What the street got was two storeys of white cladding carved into arches big enough to reverse a car through, assuming your car has excellent depth perception and no shame.
Inside, it reads like a Victorian terrace left out in the rain until it went soft at the edges — arched voids instead of hallways, a window shaped like a cartoon ghost that somehow still manages to frame the Anzac Bridge and the CBD skyline at night, and a spiral staircase so sculptural it’s basically load-bearing modern art. Underneath all the drama it settles into honeyed oak, polished concrete, a Corian kitchen, and a media room lined in timber like a very expensive sauna that happens to have a gallery wall in it. Genuinely clever. Genuinely a lot.
It’s also, according to a fair few people in the Instagram comments, a house that raises real questions about what the architects were drinking when they signed off on the ensuite. There is no door. Just an open threshold at the foot of the bed, so whoever sleeps there gets to know their partner, and the toilet, on a first-name basis. Award-winning is one word for it. ‘Weird’ came up a lot in the comments. So did several words we’re not allowed to print, and at least one person asking, not unreasonably, whether ‘architecturally designed’ is code for ‘drawn up after several bottles of red’.
It listed with a $5.5 million guide, the family behind it having simply outgrown four bedrooms, however beautifully arched, and reportedly drew serious interest from Europe, Asia and the locals alike. It’s since sold, so somewhere in Glebe there’s a new owner who has either made total peace with a fully exposed ensuite, or is currently, urgently, shopping for a very good curtain.
