Name: Inside a Creative Sydney Couple’s Small Home, Public Library and Shop, 60sqm/646sqft
Uploaded: 2025-03-31T13:25:44.000Z
Duration: 19 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When we first moved in, we noticed when we would keep the door open, there would be neighbours popping in and going, oh my gosh.

Adverbs of manner

They would want to come in, so we'd immediately invite them over.

Adverbs of degree

And then we realised, why don't we just open this up to the public?

It's both a private space of security and safety and everything a home should be.

But it's also a kind of shared space on our own terms.

I'm an arts consultant, writer and community facilitator.

We're currently in our converted terrace.

It's also called Magenta House and we use the house as a space to share and hold events.

We run micro-workshops, we have talks, we have reading sessions in the library.

We have communal meals, we have a street party with our neighbours, and most recently we also started the shop.

We operate on the ground level of our house.

We usually don't let people in upstairs so that we have that boundary.

We really wanted a space where we could spend all of our time in the house and we could evolve the rooms and be a bit more multimodal.

Walking into this house, the way that Adele McNabb, the architect, configured the space, it kind of felt like a space that how could you not share?

The house is in Redfern, Sydney, Australia, the inner city of Sydney.

We're city slickers, definitely, but what we find is even though we're in the heart of inner city, it feels like a mirage, like it's just very quiet here.

The terrace here is part of a row of micro-terraces, so they're about three metres wide, which is pretty small for Sydney.

The custom-made sculpture by Tanika Jealous was created especially for this house by the architect, and what's so funny is that when we moved into this space, the postman would actually start putting the letters in here, thinking it was a letterbox, and so we had a letterbox installed just right there to the left.

We basically bicycle around the area to do chores, to see friends.

That's your delivery basket for things from the shop if someone makes an order.

I'm very clumsy, so I ended up accidentally breaking this pot plant because I wasn't used to parking the bicycle so close.

This door is matching the colour of the rest of the house, and it creates a beautiful breeze through the front of the house.

Yeah, it allows us to be able to be at the shop at the very end and see if somebody's coming in to check out the library.

We're in the front library of the house, so just as you walk in.

When we first moved in here, the bookshelf wasn't here, and we had to figure out what were the size of the shelves according to the different sized books and magazines we had.

In curating these books, when Mason and I came together, we realised that we had a few of similar books, which meant that I knew that we were meant to be.

We decided to paint the shelves pigeon grey, or I think it's called bone grey, but I say pigeon grey because it's just more fun to say it.

It actually made the books pop a little bit more than, say, painting it like a bookshelf white.

We've clustered these into architecture, visual art, literature, poetry, and there's a lot of food culture books.

We open up this library to the public most weekends, and it's a really wonderful way to soft launch guests into this room so that they can discover something new.

When we have guests over, I find that they usually sit down here, so it's really nice to have all these different height of seating areas to be able to really be comfortable and feel like you are at a home library and not so much like a school library, somewhere a little bit more formal.

Usually when we have guests over and they wanted to have a quiet phone call or some privacy, we just close off the curtain.

So that gives us a bit of a divide in such a small house, it really works.

And then it also filters the light from the front here, so really kind of soft light and also doesn't kind of interfere with the screen light.

When I was a kid, I ran a pop-up library when I was at school, and the library is really an adult extension of that.

I grew up in the Philippines where we had a family bakery underneath my bedroom, and so we would always have people coming in and eating and serving, so I feel that creative hospitality is in my bloodline, and it's really wonderful to be able to actually open up this space for strangers or for friends.

So as we come through, there's a curved archway that separates the front and the kitchen space.

We've got an amazing spiral staircase which really helps to utilise the small area here.

We use the underneath the spiral staircase as a shoe rack and also a storage area for a trestle table that peeps out from beneath the back of the fridge.

Sometimes, yeah, Marion puts our bike helmets hanging here, but recently it's the hanging plants.

We're always thinking about new ways to put the hanging plants.

Staircase is this kind of like spiral drill that's reaching up to the top of the house.

So as we go up, we've got an amazing skylight above us, kind of carved into the ceiling.

Once you see it, it's sort of such a great sculptural feature to the house.

And when it rains and thunderstorms, it's really quite hypnotic to watch from down here.

You can see the rain and the thunders really clearly.

Issue two of our magazine is all about finding ways to slow down in the city.

Take a cue from our sloths, but don't go slow in getting your copy, because this baby is loaded with all the good things.

Gentle and joyful urban art that invites us to pause, ponder and smile.

Wild and wonderful architecture and design full of optimism and a determination to do things differently.

There are more small homes to explore and get lost in too.

Inspiration for living lighter and finding poetry in the everyday.

So one thing about this bedroom is this kind of secret hidden door, which actually we only found out about like months after we moved in here.

It was so discreet, hidden in the pocket here that we didn't even know it was there.

We have an Eva bed here, which is really great, fits well in the space.

Also has some neat little drawers here that pop out.

And then underneath the bed, we have a lot of storage, which is really cool.

I use the drawers here for storing all of my video equipment when I need to do some filming.

This is like the Dyson remote and then the Kindle.

So I'll be like this and then just be like shutting my eyes and I'll just kind of like find the spot for it.

The thing that I like most is the double height wardrobe system here.

So we've got like two different rows of clothing.

And you'll get to see the personality of me and personality of Mason.

This is what would be called a hyper clash salad of color.

And Mason, what kind of color palette do you have?

So it kind of pulls down and it's so good for just storing things that these are the stuff I don't use as much, but great to have two levels.

And in here, really cool drawers as well.

I've got pants here, socks and things, and then bits and pieces at the bottom here.

We have our spirit stash up here, which is kind of in a hard to reach place on purpose.

These great little corner shelves that Mariam usually styles with different sculptural objects and different like sort of mementos from times in our relationship and great for plants too.

We do have a lot of mosquitoes they really love outside here.

So the net's been working pretty well and we do have a shade blind for the mornings if it gets too intense as well.

Or sometimes we watch projections on the wall.

So we'll put a projector here and that blackout blind is really good for that.

The projectors underneath the bed, I've actually got to make next a little stand for the top of the bed, which will fit the projector, but it actually works perfectly on this wall.

Behind here, it looks so seamless, but actually this is a lot of the bulk of our kind of laundry storage, winter clothes.

We pack quite a lot in here, especially at the top here, there's a lot of laundry bags.

And my ice cream maker, my trusted ice cream maker is at the top there and our bike helmets.

This is an ingenious way to kind of make a discreet laundry space that also doubles as a door to the bathroom.

And it's a good way to use space and not take up space that would otherwise be taken up by a door.

We've got this really nice view from the top of the neighborhood that sort of overlooks the back studio rooftop.

And there's a sort of self-sustaining succulent garden there.

And I think Maryam more has baths than I do, but when you do have a bath, you can sit there and sort of look out to the neighborhood.