Courtyard HOUSE by Aileen Sage Architects • SYDNEY, NSW •

Dipping and sliding downhill off Sydney’s flamboyant and well-trafficked Oxford Street is a significantly less travelled but in some ways no less colourful suburban thoroughfare. Boasting none of the main drag’s eclectic flash and trash, gay bars and high-end designers, its vivacity lies instead in a charmingly heterogeneous range of typologies. Diverse housing styles somehow complement one another in a rich melange. Old, single-storey worker’s cottages, three-storey warehouse-cum-galleries, traditional two-up two-down brick terraces, and freestanding weatherboard homes are all cosily compressed in the tightest of inner-city spaces. While the mix has the potential to suggest a distracting randomness and lack of cohesion, it feels pleasingly, communally eccentric. Perched in the middle of this mix and recently added is the only new home to join the assembly in the past hundred years…