Norfolk

The site at 22 Yarranabbe Road sits on the inner curve of the peninsula's northern shore, a short walk along the road from Glenhurst Gardens and within sight of the city across Rushcutters Bay. The previous building on the site was a small post-war apartment block; the new project, completed for occupation in early 2025, replaces it with three full-floor harbourfront residences arranged over a single building.

The site

Number 22 sits on the inner curve of Yarranabbe Road, between Carthona Avenue and the Glenhurst Gardens estate, on the northern face of the peninsula. The site falls steeply from the street to the seawall, a characteristic of the peninsula's waterfront parcels. The building steps down through three principal floors, each occupying the full plate of the site, before reaching the boat-house and direct-water frontage at the foot of the garden.

The outlook is one of the most protected stretches of the inner eastern harbour: directly north across Rushcutters Bay, the city across the water at left, the bridge to the north-west, the open foreshore of Garden Island and Woolloomooloo immediately opposite. From the upper levels the line of sight runs the length of the lower harbour, from the bridge in the west to Bradleys Head and the heads beyond.

The architects

PopovBass, the studio of Alexander Popov and Erica Bass, was founded in Sydney in the late 1990s. Over the following two decades it has built a small but consistently recognised body of residential work: harbour houses in Mosman and Point Piper, country houses in the Southern Highlands, a series of boutique apartment buildings in the eastern suburbs. The studio is a regular finalist in the Australian Institute of Architects awards for residential architecture and one of the more particular Sydney practices of the period.

Norfolk sits in the studio's familiar mode: a controlled palette of natural stone, blackbutt timber and white-painted plaster. Deep cantilevered balconies are engineered to remove the sense of intervening structure between the room and the harbour. Full-height glazing runs along the north elevation. The interiors are by the same studio, in the same palette, finished to the standard of a custom house.

The plans give each residence the full footprint of a floor: three bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, a wine cellar, double secure parking. A deep waterfront balcony runs the length of the harbour elevation.

A peninsula category of its own

Norfolk belongs to a category of project the Darling Point peninsula has always preferred to build but rarely finds well executed: small boutique buildings of three to ten residences, on single harbourfront sites, designed and detailed at the standard of a custom house. The peninsula's stock of comparable buildings is short. The great majority of the apartment density on Yarranabbe Road is from the 1950s and 60s, substantially larger and substantially less particular. Norfolk is one of the very few new buildings on the road that approaches the architectural standard of the older houses around it.

The marketing campaign for the residences was handled privately, in the manner customary to the peninsula. Most of the trades were understood to have been concluded ahead of any open campaign: the ordinary pattern at the upper end of the postcode.