Sans-Arc Studio Builds a Two-Story Art Deco Addition Behind an Adelaide Stone Cottage

Most cottage renovations in Australian cities start with the same brief: keep the old front, open up the back, flood it with light. Sans-Arc Studio does all of that in City Cottage, but the result feels nothing like the formula. Behind a modest stone frontage on a quiet Adelaide street, the studio has slotted a two-story corrugated metal volume that borrows from art deco geometries, carves out a sunken living room beneath a double-height void, and tops the whole thing with a rooftop terrace wrapped in palms. It is a house that insists on being vertical in a neighborhood that is almost entirely flat.

What makes the project worth studying is the specificity of its client portrait. The owners are embedded in Adelaide's hospitality and creative start-up scenes, and the house is tuned to that life: generous kitchen surfaces for cooking with friends, built-in seating scaled for lingering, a courtyard that doubles as an outdoor dining room. Sans-Arc has long been interested in how young Australians actually entertain, and City Cottage is one of the clearest built arguments for designing around that question rather than around resale value.

Two Faces on One Plot

From the street, City Cottage barely raises its voice. The original stone cottage sits behind a white picket fence, its corrugated roof and simple verandah fitting neatly into the surrounding suburban fabric. Walk past the side fence, though, and the new volume announces itself: a white corrugated metal form with an angled upper window that catches afternoon light. The material continuity between old roof and new wall is deliberate. Corrugated steel is Adelaide vernacular, and Sans-Arc deploys it at a larger scale without shifting register.

The pergola along the side elevation mediates between the two volumes, creating a threshold that is neither fully inside nor fully outside. It softens the height differential and provides shade to the ground-level entry. From above, the white volume reads as a compact geometric object dropped into a canopy of mature trees, its flat roof given over entirely to outdoor living.

The Sunken Living Room

The spatial centerpiece of the addition is a sunken living area with timber chevron flooring, a white fireplace block, and a double-height ceiling that pulls the eye upward. The level change is subtle but effective: dropping the floor separates the social zone from the kitchen without walls, creating the kind of defined yet open gathering space that a conventional open plan rarely achieves. Green cushions on the built-in seating introduce the only saturated color in the room, grounding the palette against the warm timber and white plaster.

A curved white storage wall with integrated shelving wraps around one edge, turning the transition back toward the original cottage into an inhabited surface. Framed abstract artworks occupy the walls with confidence, scaled to the generous ceiling height rather than shrunk to typical domestic proportions. The effect is gallery-like without being precious.

Kitchen as Spine

Sans-Arc treats the kitchen not as a room but as a linear element that stitches the original cottage to the new addition. A long counter runs through the plan, anchored by a cylindrical white range hood that has become something of a Sans-Arc signature. Three gas burners sit flush in the countertop, minimal and workmanlike. The warm evening light in several of these images is not accidental: this is a house designed around dinner, and the kitchen is positioned to perform at that hour.

Where the counter meets the dining zone, the floor drops slightly, and a round table with dark upholstered chairs takes over. A spherical pendant hangs low enough to pool light on the table surface. The transition from cooking to eating is continuous, with no corridor, no door, no change in materiality. For a household that entertains frequently, this seamlessness is functional, not merely aesthetic.

Courtyard and Rooftop

City Cottage operates on three outdoor levels. At ground level, a courtyard terrace with a pale stone table and a built-in sage green bench sits beside tropical planting, creating an intimate outdoor room scaled for four or five people. This is the everyday space, shaded and enclosed. Above it, the rooftop terrace opens to the sky with built-in seating, a planted bed of palms, and a timber pergola that filters the harsh Adelaide sun. The rooftop is the house's release valve: a place to see the tree canopy without being overlooked.

The covered terrace at dusk reveals how carefully Sans-Arc has choreographed artificial light. A spherical pendant hangs beneath the timber slat pergola, casting a warm glow across the integrated bench and plantings. The effect is closer to a restaurant terrace than a suburban deck, which is precisely the point for owners who draw no hard line between domestic and hospitality settings.

Details and Material Choices

The furniture selection reveals a commitment to tactile richness over trend. An olive green upholstered chair with a curved backrest sits on herringbone timber flooring, its color drawn from the same family as the courtyard bench and living room cushions. Potted plants on a timber window ledge catch daylight beside built-in seating, blurring the line between furniture and architecture. Throughout the house, shelving is integrated into walls rather than applied, suggesting that Sans-Arc designed for specific collections of glassware and pottery rather than abstract storage needs.

The herringbone and chevron timber floors deserve attention. They shift direction subtly between rooms, marking thresholds without the need for level changes or material breaks. It is an old technique, borrowed from European interiors, and it works particularly well here because the house has so few internal doors.

Bathroom as Object Lesson

The bathroom distills the project's personality into a single room. A freestanding tub sits against a wall of square mosaic tiles, with a checkerboard floor pattern that nods to the art deco references running through the addition. Wall-mounted taps keep the surfaces clean, and natural daylight enters through a window that is generous by bathroom standards. It is a room that feels considered rather than spec'd from a catalogue.

Seen through the doorway, the vanity and checkerboard floor compose a still life. Sans-Arc has always been good at framing views within their houses, treating door openings as picture planes. Here, the technique serves a practical purpose too: it lets a compact bathroom feel larger by extending sight lines into adjacent spaces.

Why This Project Matters

City Cottage matters because it takes the Australian cottage renovation, arguably the country's most common residential commission, and reframes it as a vertical proposition. By stacking a rooftop terrace above a double-height living room above a courtyard, Sans-Arc extracts three distinct outdoor experiences from a tight urban footprint. The 145 square meters of interior space feel considerably larger because the section does so much work.

More broadly, the project is an argument for designing houses around the social habits of specific people rather than around generic notions of family living. The kitchen-as-spine, the restaurant-grade outdoor lighting, the built-in shelving for curated collections: these are not universal moves, and they would not suit every client. But they suit these clients precisely, and that precision is what gives City Cottage its energy. Sans-Arc continues to demonstrate that residential architecture is most convincing when it refuses to be polite.

City Cottage by Sans-Arc Studio, Adelaide, Australia. 145 m², completed 2025. Photography by Jack Fenby.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.