There is a fundamental difference between designing a house for someone else and designing one for yourself. The first requires empathy; the second demands honesty. Without the distance offered by a client, architecture becomes an exercise in self-observation, exposing habits, routines and contradictions that rarely surface through a conventional design brief.

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard described the house as "our corner of the world", a place where memory, imagination and identity intertwine. More than sixty years later, his reflection feels increasingly relevant. As housing becomes progressively standardised, shaped by market logic and increasingly universal ways of living, an architect's own home remains one of the few opportunities to test ideas against the unpredictability of everyday life rather than the certainty of drawings.

Little James, the recently completed Sydney home of Studio Carson Kelly founders Klaus Carson Kelly and Nicholas Carson Kelly, belongs to this tradition. Before redesigning the narrow Victorian terrace, they chose to live in it for an entire year, allowing the building itself to reveal its rhythms, shortcomings and untapped potential. Rather than imposing an architectural vision, the project slowly emerged through daily experience, where light, movement and domestic rituals became the true design brief. The result is a house that demonstrates how generosity is not necessarily a question of size, but of precision; where every material, every opening and every spatial decision reflects a deeply personal understanding of what it means to inhabit a place.

Simone Lorusso: Before becoming a project, Little James was your home for an entire year. How did living in the house before redesigning it change your understanding of architecture? Were there discoveries that no drawing or survey could have revealed?

Klaus Carson Kelly & Nicholas Carson Kelly: We should be honest, we knew what this house needed the day we walked in. A narrow, southern-facing terrace, boundary to boundary, is a problem we understand well: bring light down from above, waste nothing on circulation, make every room count. The year didn't hand us those answers. It stress tested them.

What it did do was sharpen the details. A survey tells you the terrace is less than four metres wide; living there tells you what four metres means at seven in the morning, when two people want the same hallway. We spent twelve months watching light move — where it arrived, at what hour, in what quality — and the house confirmed almost everything we'd suspected, occasionally to the centimetre.

So the discoveries weren't revelations. They were verifications. By the end of the year we weren't guessing about anything and there's a particular confidence in designing from evidence rather than assumption.  

"What the observation gave us was precision, the confidence to give the most-used rooms the best light and the most generous proportions, and to compress or quietly retire everything else without second-guessing."

SL: We often talk about architecture in terms of space, but much less in terms of rituals. During the year you spent living in Little James before redesigning it, did you find yourselves observing not only the house, but your own everyday behaviours? How much of the final project is actually a response to those rituals?

KCK & NCK: We watched ourselves closely, yes — where we actually stood to make coffee, where things piled up, which rooms we gravitated to and which we only ever walked through. Habits are more honest than intentions. You can tell yourself you'll use a formal dining room; your behaviour calls your bluff within a month.

But the rituals refined the plan; they didn't write it. The architecture came from years of knowing how houses like this work. What the observation gave us was precision, the confidence to give the most-used rooms the best light and the most generous proportions, and to compress or quietly retire everything else without second-guessing. That's the real value of living in a project first. Not discovering what to do, knowing exactly how far to push it.

SL: Designing for yourselves meant removing the traditional dialogue between architect and client. How did that freedom and perhaps that responsibility, change your decision-making process?

KCK & NCK: The dialogue didn't disappear, it just moved in-house. There are two of us, and we come at design from different directions: one through architecture, one through interior design. We took turns being the client, and neither of us is an easy one. Every decision had to survive both readings.

What changed was the accountability. A client keeps you honest through their needs; without one, you have to keep yourself honest through discipline. The temptation when designing for yourself is to over-design — to treat the house as a manifesto. We went the other way. Restraint became the brief. If a decision couldn't justify itself in daily use, it didn't make the cut. And the responsibility is real. There's nowhere to hide in your own home. Every shortcut, you live with and it knows where you sleep.KCK & NCK: Constraint can be incredibly clarifying. When you're working on a site less than four metres wide, every square metre has a job to do. Rather than trying to force flexibility into the plan, we focused on making each space feel intuitive and effortless to use.

That thinking led to some of the project's defining moves. The stair isn't just a stair, it folds the laundry into its structure and removes the need for redundant corridors altogether. Each bedroom stretches boundary to boundary, so the rooms feel far larger than the footprint has any right to suggest. We weren't trying to make the house do more. We were trying to make it do exactly what it needed to do, exceptionally well.

SL: Light appears to operate almost like a building material, shaping the experience of the house as much as brick, stone or steel. At what point did daylight become the protagonist of the project rather than simply a technical consideration?

KCK & NCK: The first winter, honestly. A southern aspect on a boundary-to-boundary site gives you nothing for free — light had to be borrowed, bounced, coaxed down from above. Once we accepted that, light stopped being a technical consideration and became the organising idea. Rooms were positioned around where light could be found, not the other way around.

We started treating it exactly as you describe — as a material, with its own qualities and moods, selected as deliberately as stone or timber. Some rooms receive it directly; others get it once-reflected, softer, at a particular hour. That variation gives each space its own quality of quiet. The result is a house that changes across the day. Light doesn't pour in. It arrives. And the architecture exists largely to receive it well.

SL: Throughout the project, materiality feels remarkably restrained yet incredibly tactile. Rather than selecting finishes for visual impact, it seems each material was chosen for how it will be lived with over time. How do you approach the idea of materials as something that evolves rather than simply decorates?

KCK & NCK: In a house this size, every material has to earn its keep. There's no spare room to carry a finish that's only decorative — with minimal space and minimal quantities, each material has to do real work: hold light, extend a room, define a threshold, carry the day-to-day. Nothing was chosen for impact alone. Everything was chosen for a job.

That's what restraint means to us here. The palette is narrow not as a stylistic position but because the plan couldn't afford passengers. A mirrored surface isn't a gesture; it's doubling the light in a room the site would otherwise deny it. When quantities are small, every decision is exposed, so every decision has to be right.

The evolution is really about relationship. These aren't materials you glance at; they're materials you negotiate with daily, at close range. Over time they stop reading as finishes and start reading as the house itself. That's when a material has done its job, when you can no longer picture the room without it.

"Respect for heritage, for us, isn't about preserving material. It's about understanding what a building type knows, and letting that knowledge inform what comes next."

KCK & NCK:  Longevity means building once, properly. The most sustainable house is the one that never needs to be done again — compact in plan, durable in fabric, detailed precisely enough that nothing ever asks to be replaced or corrected.

But longevity is also an aesthetic discipline. Houses date when they chase their moment. We tried to strip Little James of anything that belonged too obviously to now — no gestures, no trends, nothing performing for the year it was built. What's left is proportion, light and material, and those don't expire. The terrace it replaced stood for well over a century. It felt rude to aim for anything less. A house designed to age is also, quietly, a house designed to be handed on — it was ours for a while, and it should be someone else's for much longer.

SL: The project never feels nostalgic, yet it maintains a respectful dialogue with the Victorian terrace rather than erasing its identity. How do you negotiate the balance between preservation and contemporary expression without falling into either imitation or contrast for its own sake?

KCK & NCK: By taking the typology seriously rather than the artefact sentimentally. The original fabric had reached the end of its life, so the house was rebuilt from the ground up — including the facade, which was reconstructed exactly as it stood. Not retained as a relic; rebuilt, deliberately, as an architectural decision. The street keeps its rhythm. The terrace keeps its face.

Behind that face, there's no imitation and no forced contrast. What carries through is the discipline of the terrace itself — the narrow plan, the party walls, the proportions, that lovely compression and release of moving through a long thin house. Those constraints shaped the new work far more honestly than any period detail could have.

Respect for heritage, for us, isn't about preserving material. It's about understanding what a building type knows, and letting that knowledge inform what comes next.

SL: Today many homes are designed to photograph well before they are designed to be lived in. Little James feels remarkably resistant to that culture. How do you define beauty in a domestic space, and do you think social media has changed the way we design and perceive our homes?

KCK & NCK: Beauty, for us, is a room at a specific hour. The way light lands seven in the afternoon, the temperature of a material under your hand, a space that asks nothing of you. It's experienced in close-up and over time. A photograph can record it, but a room designed for the photograph rarely survives the living. Social media has certainly changed how homes are conceived. It rewards the wide shot, the single hero image, the gesture you can read in half a second. But nobody lives in a wide shot. You live in thresholds, corners, mornings.

Little James was designed from the inside out — from a year of occupation, not a mood board. If it photographs well, it's because it works, not the other way around. That order matters. The camera left. We stayed, for a while. The house was always for the staying.

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Words: Simone Lorusso
Photos: Dina Grinberg