This stunning waterfront residence on Sydney Harbour was conceived as a home nestled within a series of stepped landscaped terraces, sandstone walls and native landscape; each level emerging as its own garden pavilion, blurring the line between its built and natural form.

The orientation of the rooms and terraced gardens maximise the spectacular views of Sydney Harbour, skyline and the adjoining beaches, whilst providing privacy from overlooking neighbours.

Working with the site’s narrow proportion and steep topography, this home will be built below a significant heritage 1920’s house on the street, preserving its existing outlook, gardens and curtilage. This innovative design also provides discreet separate entrances, parking and addresses for each.

A complex and prolonged approval process, assisted by a team of experts, resulted in the successful approval in the Land and Environment Court.

Located on Gadigal land in Surry Hills, our proposal reinvents the historic Kirk as a new fine dining restaurant and extends its form and language to create a new four-storey commercial building. Rather than the bulky, rectilinear shape of the planning controls, the pitched roof form of the new building better integrates with the the church, lowers the street wall and brings more daylight into the street and surrounding properties.

The buttresses of the church are extended in concrete for the new building, expressed to provide solar and privacy protection to the interior and host lush planting for the façade. The design accommodates active uses on the ground floor and office spaces on the levels above. It integrates a sophisticated solution for site access, circulation, and servicing.

New hospitality and workplace spaces reflect the character of the area and activate the surrounding streets. The project will provide an important contribution to the neighbourhood and continue the rich urban story of the site since the deconsecrating of the original Wesleyan Chapel in the 1970s.


Project Team:
Client: TOGA
Planner: PlanningLab
Structure: SDA Structures
Services: Donnelly Simpson Cleary Consulting
Landscape: 360 Degrees
ESD: Aspire
BCA: Steve Watson and Partners
Access: ABS Access
Heritage: Curio Projects
Acoustic: Renzo Tonin & Associates
Traffic: Stantec
Fire Engineer: Scientific Fire Services
VT: ABN Lift Consultants
Civil: Henry & Hymas
Waste: Elephants Foot
Geotech: Foundation Earth Sciences
Visualisations: ShadowLine Studio

This converted warehouse studio in Chippendale is the first home of EM BE CE and the practice’s debut project. It was conceived, built, and inhabited in just 4 weeks. Occupying the entire top floor of a former mechanic’s shop, the design is deliberately restrained, touching the existing building fabric only very lightly.

The character of the space is restored to its original qualities defined by its generous volume, elemental materiality and ample natural light and air provided by windows on three sides. The interior layout speaks of the practice’s values and culture, with the space organised as series of furniture islands, not unlike an apartment. A single shared working desk not only accommodates the whole team but acts as a place of conversation, collaboration, and exchange of ideas. A warm palette of materials and selected custom furniture pieces complete the home like environment.

We are pleased to share our Stage 2 design excellence competition proposal for The Cutaway prepared in collaboration with Andrew Burges Architects (ABA).

Our approach was centered on retaining the monumental character of this extraordinary found space, dominated by it’s existing sandstone wall (created when the wharves were carved from the headland), it’s monumental concrete structure and it’s opening to the sky. Our proposal did just enough to enable the space’s effective occupation for a wide range of uses; from events and performances, to markets and exhibitions.

We provided a new layer of infrastructure to allow the existing character of the space to be retained or for the space to be completely reinvented, ensuring each event is memorable and unique.


Project team:
Architecture: Andrew Burges Architects in collaboration with EM BE CE
First Nations: Michael Mossman
Theatre: Marshall Day
Events: Rizer
Exhibition: Youssofzay + Hart Architects
Structural: Richard Green Consulting with TTW
Mechanical, Hydraulic, Electrical, Security, VT, Acoustic and AV: Stantec
Sustainability: Arup
BCA: Philip Chun
DDA: 8 Squared
Fire: WSP
Fire: Redfire
Lighting: Electrolight
Heritage: Urbis
Public Art: UAP
Safety: Safe Design Australia
Traffic: SCT
Visualisations: ShadowLineStudio

EM BE CE was unanimously selected as the winner of a Design Excellence Competition for a 27-storey mixed use residential tower in Chatswood. Our design introduces Cambridge Walk as a significant new, sun-filled, and activated public open space, over 900m2 of green roof planting, and a majority of high amenity, dual frontage apartments.

The Jury praised the winning teams' high level of urban and architectural ambition, the resolution of the scheme, and the exceptionally clear graphic and verbal presentation of the proposal… The jury noted the careful and sensitive modulation of the building envelope to maximise northern light into neighbouring buildings, residents’ apartments, communal and public open space, and the folding of podium wall heights to align with neighbouring buildings, integrated the project in a nuanced manner.

Our design is an integrated expression of how people live and work in this particular place.

The architecture is singular, a direct expression of its place within the city. It draws the landscape from Sydney Harbour, the Botanic Gardens, the Domain and Hyde Park into the building to create a tower of gardens. The architecture responds to the brutalist building that occupies the site currently, forming a distinctive bookend to the block with the Masonic Centre on Goulburn Street. Our proposal reinterprets this as a tower of sandstone.

The building is an expression of the people and communities that live there. We have ensured that every apartment enjoys the view to the harbour. We have also established a series of local communities based on shared communal amenity, breaking down the anonymity of large-scale residential apartment buildings.

The design was developed as part of a City of Sydney Design Excellence Competition process.

This project transforms the home of our client’s fashion business from two single frontage, deep floorplate industrial units into an exciting new workplace, showroom, and exhibition space set between two gardens.

Located in Alexandria, a Sydney suburb that is undergoing rapid transformation from an industrial area into a vibrant mix of offices, tech, and retail, our proposal offers an innovative solution to how this change can be effectively performed within the constraints of an existing strata lot.

Designed for high adaptability and internal connectivity, new office spaces prioritise daylight, user amenity and sustainability. Existing fully built-out site will now include two new outdoor communal spaces with substantial gardens and seven large new trees, resulting in 20% tree canopy cover and 20% deep soil area.

This highly sustainable development will contain close to 500m2 of rooftop PVs, achieve 5.5 stars NABERS performance, with EV charging stations, on-site water recycling and reuse, and a robust hi performance façade to ensure substantial reductions in ongoing greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption.

The Hall Street Apartments are a direct response to the character of the place. They maximizes the vibrant neighbourhood character of Bondi and makes great places for people to live.

Our approach is a response to one of the most memorable characteristics of the site, the way that the large street trees of Consett Avenue creates a moment of landscape calm in the hard edged character of Hall Street. We are proposing to draw this landscape into the architecture of our building, extending it around the corner and into Hall Street, bringing new biodiversity and life into the street.

This curved geometry of the building is developed in detail as a series of landscape and material strata, extending the narrative of the landscape and providing the foundation for it.

In established urban areas, opportunities to insert new infill buildings in the existing heritage conservation areas are few and far between. This new home in the Sydney’s eastern suburbs is a contemporary interpretation of a traditional terrace house, carefully inserted into the stepping street wall, its architecture in a delicate dialogue with the language of the surrounding buildings.

Accommodation consists of three bedrooms, each with its ensuite, whole floor living and dining room opening onto a courtyard and an elevated north-facing outdoor terrace. There is a garage with two car parking spaces and additional storage areas. Internal layout and spaces maximise the internal amenity, daylight and natural ventilation while maintaining the privacy and sunlight to neighbouring terraces on both sides.

Our proposal for five terraces under a built to rent model provides affordable housing for families living on the Central Coast. Although the site was suitable for an apartment building, our client was interested in the “missing middle” to provide low rise housing diversity for changing lifestyle choices. Development consent from the Land and Environment Court has been obtained in April 2023.

Our design is a contemporary interpretation of the terrace form. The variegated rhythm uses a singular material palette of bricks to provide a robust and low maintenance built form. The bricks vary from solid to screen to provide privacy to key internal areas. Larger openings to the living level extend the spatial amenity of the interiors from the northern courtyard through to the views to the south. Landscaping, an elevated terrace and green balconies extend the interior into a variety of outdoor spaces.

Skyfarm was a much loved home and guest accommodation set in pristine bushland atop a mountain near Kangaroo Valley. It was also one of many properties that were sadly lost in the bushfires of 2019-2020. Our brief was to help the clients rebuild and to design new buildings with maximum protection against future bushfires.

The design works with the existing topography. It embraces the spectacular distant views, brings in the the sunlight, opens to the surrounding gardens, and protects the privacy of the bedrooms. A singular vaulted ceiling brings together the public rooms of the home. Two connected and sliding building volumes both join and separate the guest areas from the main home. Solid masonry construction and concealed fire shutters convert the building into a fireproof box.

This project for alterations and additions to a single story terrace in the Inner West has transformed a simple two bedroom home to a four bedroom house with a study. The design seeks to address some of the key challenges of the terrace house model: their limited natural day light and ventilation and the scale of spaces.

A small courtyard brings light and air to the second bedroom. The living spaces of the house are oriented around a small garden courtyard. The section of the living room, where the ground floor occupies the full width of the site, while the first floor is offset from the boundary by 900 mm, brings northern light and ventilation to the long side of this room. The materiality of the building is a simple expression of its making, brickwork and timber framing abstracted through the consistent treatment of white paint simplifying the definition of the room.

Our proposal for a new private residence in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs has been selected as a winner in an invited design competition. The site enjoys expansive views over Sydney Harbour and the City but is also overlooked by adjoining houses from behind and from the sides. The design successfully resolves the difficult site conditions, maximises the views, creates a network of new private open spaces, whilst protecting privacy from and to the neighbours.

Curved concrete balconies on the waterfront façade engage with the view and geometry of the bay while the remaining three sides are defensive, constructed as sculpted folding walls. The regular elements of brickwork facet to adjust to the curvature of the wall surface. All interior spaces respond to the site topography and connect to a series of garden terraces that surround the house.

This family home in an idyllic rural setting was imagined by our clients as a culmination of their lifelong passion for sustainable, energy efficient, intelligent and biodiverse way of living that is also timeless and uncompromisingly beautiful. The brief called for a biophilic design with 100% renewable power using locally sourced low embodied energy materials with minimal environmental impact.

The design we developed is scientifically precise in achieving the orientation and passive design with the building geometry drawing the daylight deep in the winter and blocking all direct sunlight on windows and doors in mid-summer. The architecture consists of rows of sculptural rammed earth columns and walls with elegant folding copper roof surfaces defining a simple and elegant building profile in the gently undulating landscape.