The Rental | Nicholas Gurney

The Rental is a 20sqm studio apartment in Sydney’s Kings Cross precinct offered as a model to highlight an alternative to home ownership. Small, inner city dwellings would seem ideal for young, first home buyers but in a competitive property market, aspirational buyer can quickly become luckless renter. In an attempt to combat this trend, the project is fashioned on a ‘win-win’ proposition whereby a landlord commissions a creative ‘soon-to-be’ tenant to plan and undertake the renovation. The Rental’s interior design melds modest, unassuming materials of distinct architectural quality with the original, decorative fabric of the art deco walk-up block. A series of simple, low-tech joinery pieces form zones within the tiny space. The budget, less than 40k, dictated that a solitary carpenter cut and assemble material on site, within the confines of the apartment, to create a kitchen, bedroom nook and storage blocks. To conceal the bedroom nook from the rest of the apartment, a joinery unit with sliding desk was conceived. A steel plate shelf, fitted wall-to-wall, conceals the sliding door track and supports the weight of a storage block to allow the desk to slide seamlessly between.