Home is where you make it.

That decision became the beginning of a long architectural project - but also of a family home. Ben, a registered architect, and Sam, an architectural academic, together designed a house around the way they wanted to live. Their two daughters grew up here. Ben's father came out of retirement to help with the detailing. His sisters contributed to the development application and kitchen drawings. A close friend became the builder.

"It was a protracted process for various reasons, which meant some emotional moments, but a lot of love went into bringing it all together," Ben says. "I think you can feel it in the home."

It’s a sophisticated reworking of the classic Surry Hills terrace, but one that resists the expected playbook. Rather than simply opening the back and flooding the traditional plan with light, the architects turned their attention to the middle.

Sam had always disliked the characteristic terrace ‘tube’ - a long sequence of rooms illuminated primarily from either end. Their solution was both architectural and theatrical: mirrors, skylights and a central void combine to make the centre of the house feel expansive, luminous and almost slightly unreal.

"We'd seen some great interiors while visiting Paris with full wall mirrors, so we hit on making the middle of the house parallel mirrors that created an infinity effect," Ben says. "This allowed light and ventilation in the centre of the house, and a spatial effect that makes it feel much larger - at least until your brain works out the illusion."

In the dining area, where the vertical void draws sunlight deep into the plan, mirrors amplify the greenery, light and texture, while hanging plants transform the space into what Ben describes as a beautiful jungle interior, sunlight dappling through the leaves.

The architectural intervention is dramatic, but the material palette is deliberately warm.

 Using the original Surry Hills brick as a starting point, the couple stripped the internal render themselves, uncovering the building's original masonry - warm ochres, orange and sandstone tones, with dark slate-grey flecks. Those colours were carried through the new interior in timber, slate, tile and a particular matte blue that became a recurring note.

Slate is used underfoot and continues into the kitchen island, where it meets silver ash shelving and stairs. Hoop pine plywood lines the kitchen. Black aluminium frames connect with brass detailing, while galvanised steel and fibre cement bring a more robust, almost industrial quality to the exterior.

Inside the central void, galvanised steel becomes part of the architecture itself, supporting shelves and planting and deliberately introducing something of an exterior language into the heart of the house.

An attention to sensory experience runs through the entire house. A concrete slab provides significant thermal mass, while underfloor heating brings warmth to the slate floors in winter. The living and dining areas are heated from beneath, with additional bathroom heating, while solar panels contribute to the home's efficiency.

For Ben, good design is less about making a statement than making a place work beautifully over time.

“Our approach is about designing for people and place, reflecting personality and experimenting where possible," he says. “It’s not too fussy, allowing materials to wear and bring out different qualities as they age.”

With storage carefully integrated, spaces can adapt to different uses, while sliding panels can alter the relationship between rooms. The Centor screen system is particularly effective around the main bedroom. Open, the bedroom connects visually through the house towards the rear garden. Closed, it becomes private.

"Being able to see the rear garden from the bathroom across the void and through the main bedroom was really special," Ben says.

The architecture also proved its worth when the house became the family's entire world during lockdown. With a five-year-old and a baby at home, the rooms adapted overnight. The front room became a kindergarten art space. The top room became a large studio. The extended lower step in front of the mirrors became a stage.

Other memories are quieter. Family meals around the dining table. The rear garden, which has always felt remarkably removed from the energy of Surry Hills beyond its walls.

"As a young family we obviously spent a lot of time in the dining and living area, enjoying the play of light from the central void at the dining table, being able to seamlessly open the living room to outside," Ben says. "The backyard has always felt like a secret garden in the bustling heart of Surry Hills. It's very quiet and serene."

That sense of refuge is an achievement beneath all the invention. It never feels like an exercise in architecture for architecture's sake. The house is tactile, practical and deeply lived-in.

Now, after a sabbatical year in Berlin and a relocation to Newcastle, the family is preparing to let the house go.

It is clearly not a straightforward sale. This is a home that has absorbed years of work, family life and creative energy. Its significance is not simply in the quality of its architecture, but in the fact that the architecture was developed alongside the family's own story.

The next owners will inherit a finely resolved terrace where concrete, brick, timber, slate, mirrors, planting and light have been brought together with unusual precision. But more importantly, they inherit a home that has already proved its ability to change with the people inside it.

"I hope they get to enjoy the tranquillity and warmth of the home, that they find the little moments of tactility and delight and sunlight that we tried to create," Ben says.

"I think we managed to get a lot into that classic Sydney terrace."

Rather than asking a narrow terrace to become something it isn't, Ben and Sam found ways to make its limitations productive - to borrow light, manufacture volume, create privacy, bring the garden into the centre and make every part of its compact footprint work harder.

While certainly an architectural experience, it conveys something more difficult to design: a house that remembers how people live.

View the listing: 3 Raper Street, Surry Hills