Hidden Garden House
Darlinghurst, Sydney
Hidden Garden House is Trias's renovation of an 1890s terrace on a 45 square metre site in Darlinghurst, in Sydney, completed in 2021 for the ceramicist Laura Butler of Mennt and her partner Aman Braich. They bought the house in 2016 and saved for four years to do it. Trias turned the staircase around, moved the kitchen, took out a bathroom and added a courtyard with a Japanese maple; upstairs the second bedroom went, in favour of an open bathroom with a roof garden. The kitchen is timber, bagged brickwork and raw brass, and Butler made the terracotta floor tiles and the white tiles that rim the lightwell herself. The name comes from Japanese temples, "whose gardens provide unexpected and welcome sanctuary", in the studio's words.
The card is the dining room, from The Design Files' shoot: a wraparound timber bench along the wall, a table Butler designed and Zandt Building made, a Mogensen J39 chair, a Lenticchia pendant by Peter Zumthor for Viabizzuno, and the tall timber-framed opening to the courtyard maple, with the kitchen and Mennt ceramics beyond and a sandstone block salvaged in the demolition as the internal step. Trias on the bench: "A wraparound timber bench provides dining room seating, before turning to become a step." Butler on the courtyard, which Studio Rewild designed: it is "a beautiful green space that helps establish scale; ages with the home; and the leaves of the Japanese maple remind you of the changes in season".
Trias
Trias is a Sydney architecture studio founded in 2017 by Jennifer McMaster, Casey Bryant and Jonathon Donnelly. McMaster on the studio's thinking: "The more we can design homes that are adaptable and robust, the less we are demolishing buildings because they are too rigid in their planning." Its Draped House is also in this library.
Architecture @trias.studio. Styling @tessthyregod. Photography @alishagore. Landscape design Studio Rewild. Seen via @thedesignfiles.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched September 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.