How a crumbling Surry Hills terrace became a stunning family home after a four-year renovation

• Owners: Architecture academic Sam Spurr and architect Ben Hewett
• The property: A gut-renovated inner-Sydney terrace
• Address: 3 Raper Street, Surry Hills, NSW
• Price guide: $2.7 million
• Agent: BresicWhitney, Michael Kirk 0401 568 412

Sam Spurr and her fiance Ben Hewett had all but decided that the crumbling Surry Hills terrace they were inspecting was too far gone for a first-home purchase.

Then the agent handed Spurr a fresh, juicy fig from a tree in the backyard.

“I’ll never forget biting into that fig,” Spurr says. “It tasted incredible. It felt like a sign.”

Spurr and Hewett met while studying architecture at the University of New South Wales, so the prospect of a renovation felt less daunting than it might have done for anyone else.

Even so, they realised the transformation would require significant effort. The house had no indoor toilet, only a backyard dunny, and the lean-to kitchen was rotting away.

“It was also incredibly dingy inside,” Spurr recalls. “There were layers of linoleum, the floors were damaged and the walls were painted different colours.”

The pair suspected there were structural issues, too. “Nothing was straight,” Hewitt says. “Every surface was warping in multiple directions.”

They began work by gingerly removing the ground-floor ceilings, but doing so revealed another problem: termites had ravaged much of the internal timber.

“That was the point at which we said: ‘Oh, let’s just gut it,’ and accepted the fact that this would be a long and involved process,” Hewitt says.

Gutting the home opened up possibilities. “It meant we could lower the ground floor, and then the first floor, which meant more volume in the attic space,” Hewitt says.

Hewitt and his best mate, a builder, laid a concrete slab to provide a solid base for the new internal walls, protect against further termite infestations and create significant thermal mass.

A floor plan soon took shape, featuring a full-floor kitchen-dining-living space, an enlarged bathroom and two bedrooms on the first floor, and a third bedroom in the attic.

Then came material selection. “We wanted a palette of materials and colours that shifted through the house, giving each space a slightly different feel,” Hewitt notes.

Maximising the sense of light and air downstairs was a priority, so the pair chose blonde-wood joinery, a white-painted timber ceiling and powder-blue kitchen cabinetry. Two large mirror panels face each other in the dining area, creating an infinity effect.

Other notable materials include deep-grey limestone tiles in the bathroom and original exposed brick in the stairwell. The handsome slate floors downstairs are cool underfoot in summer and warmed by underfloor heating in winter.

Throughout, subtle touches – such as an Italian-plaster finish on the downstairs walls – enhance the living experience. “The plaster is a detail that people often don’t notice, but it takes in and softens the light in that room in a special way,” Spurr says.

Work began in 2015 and took four painstaking years. It was a family affair: Hewitt’s sisters helped prepare the development application and draw up plans, and Spurr’s mother gave over a bedroom in her Manly unit for the couple to decamp to.

By the time they moved in, Spurr and Hewitt had two small children in tow. Then, within months, the pandemic hit.

“Being locked down with a five-year-old and a baby should have been hard, but in that house, it wasn’t,” Hewitt says. “Downstairs became a kindergarten art space, and the top bedroom became a studio space for us both. We never felt constrained.”

Now, after six happy years, the couple have listed the home for sale ahead of a move to Newcastle, where Spurr teaches architecture.

Prospective buyers with a predilection for figs will be pleased to know that the backyard tree remains.

“We weren’t able to spend as much time tending to it as the old man who lived here before us,” Spurr says, “but it still gives you a pretty nice fig.”

SOLD - $2,900,000

3 Raper Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010

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