Property Of The Week: 31 Durham Street, Stanmore, NSW
Character and convenience in Sydney’s inner-west.
Character and convenience in Sydney’s inner-west.
Introducing this charming residence, conveniently located near the inner-west suburb of Stanmore’s train station, village hub and nearby to the lively streets of neighbouring Newtown.
The 3-bedroom, 1-bathroom, 1-car parking home blends traditional character with modern appeal with its newly refreshed interiors and cottage façade.
The home sees high ceilings, skylights and timber floors add to the sense of space created by the open-plan layout of the living and dining space.
Further, the home is privy to a modern kitchen, replete with stainless steel appliances and a stone benchtop, leading to an internal laundry.
Period touches are found throughout the residence, such as stain-glass windows, french doors and ornate tiling.
The residence’s accommodation includes two good size bedrooms on the ground floor while an upper-level retreat completes with balcony access and a walk-in robe informs the main suite.
Outside sees a low maintenance courtyard with access to a rear lane and secure parking.
Typifying inner west living, the home is only 6.3km from Sydney’s CBD.
The home will be sold via online auction on September 16. The listing is with Pilcher Residential’s Simon Pilcher (+61 425 216 043). Price guide $1.7 million; pilcher-residential.com
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities
Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.
This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.
“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real.
“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”
Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.
He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.
“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes.
“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”
Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.
Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.
“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said.
“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?
“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.”
At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.
“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”
And there’s no AI option for that.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’