Pocket Passiv is a Highly Efficient Sydney House by Anderson Architecture

Anderson Architecture has designed a studio apartment in Sydney, Australia, as a model for infilling constrained areas with well-designed, environmentally conscious housing options.

Pocket Passiv, located in the inner-city suburb of Glebe, occupies a 27-square-metre site formerly made up of unused space around a corner terrace house.

The intention for the tiny timber-clad home was to demonstrate how urban infill sites can be made to work hard, offering a space-saving solution that does little to compromise amenity.

Pocket Passiv takes its name from Passivhaus Plus, an advanced low-energy design standard. With its envelope designed to optimise insulation and air-tightness, and its roof covered with solar panels, the studio is so energy efficient that it generates as much energy as it consumes.

“Passivhaus Plus further acknowledges the building’s ability to generate as much energy as it consumes – ultimately becoming a net zero energy building,” said the architecture studio.

Beyond its sustainability credentials, the studio was designed to respond to its neighbours.

It has an asymmetrical pitched rood that allows for solar cells behind and defers to the historic terrace houses on two sides. It also creates additional height within the Two-storey structure, which sits about a metre below street level.

Above a combined bedroom and study on the ground floor, the angled roof creates a dramatic, double-height effect in the bathroom, which features a freestanding bath framed by a picture window.

The upstairs space is conFigured around a kitchen along the wall, complete with a dining nook and a seating space. Minimal finishes ensure this compact space feels as open as possible.

The building’s design gives it a distinctive identity – the ridgeline leans out towards the street – evoking the eye of a cheeky character peeking out from the corner of a room. This almost fictive quality is enhanced by a repeated, scallop motif applied both as roof tiles and to the building’s exterior shell, reminiscent of scales.

Because the street-facing facade is slightly tripartite, the tiles here sit at changing angles to lend a somewhat unpredictable texture to the facade.

“The project achieves ambitious levels of amenity for its residents and has been built to the Passivhaus Plus Standard, an esteemed accreditation for high performance and energy-efficient buildings originating from Germany,” said the architects.

“Beyond its impressive energy-efficient design and construction, Pocket Passiv offers an example of a rare yet needed typology of inner-Sydney residential housing,” it added.

Through Pocket Passiv’s design and performance, the project aims to set an example for creating new housing by Ashley Carmichael infilling small, under-utilised urban spaces – balancing the preservation of existing heritage and traditional streetscape, with a contemporary presence.

The architects intend for this hyper-local spatial and formal resolution to inspire a broader discussion about atypical, non-extractive, non-wasteful land use in urban contexts.