Architect
Koichi Takada
The Japanese-born Sydney architect behind the 77–81 Yarranabbe Road project.
Koichi Takada is the Japanese-born, Sydney-based architect whose studio has produced, over the past fifteen years, some of the most visibly unusual residential buildings on the east coast of Australia. He is the designer of the new project being built at 77–81 Yarranabbe Road.
Koichi Takada was born in Tokyo in 1971 and educated in the United Kingdom and the United States — first at the Architectural Association in London, then at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He worked in New York and London before settling in Sydney in the mid-2000s, and opened his own practice, Koichi Takada Architects, in 2008. The studio has grown over the following years into one of the more internationally recognisable Sydney-based practices, with completed and in-progress projects in Australia, Japan, the United States, Italy, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
The work
Takada's residential towers are distinctive for a recurring motif — the borrowing of natural form, often quite literal — which the studio has described as a deliberate counterweight to the rectilinear apartment tower that dominates Australian coastal development. Projects such as Infinity by Crown at Green Square in Sydney, the Arc tower in the city, Crown Residences at One Barangaroo, and a sequence of Gold Coast and Brisbane residential buildings have made the practice a regular feature of the Australian architectural press, and have given Takada a public profile unusual for a residential architect of his generation.
The studio's interiors work, which runs in parallel, has a similar tendency: Japanese restaurants in Sydney and Tokyo, residential sales galleries, and the occasional retail fit-out all share an interest in the articulated, often timber-framed interior. What the buildings have in common is a willingness to commit to a single strong formal gesture — a curved timber cloud ceiling, a tree-like tower, a wave-profile façade — rather than the more cautious glass-and-stone defaults of the Sydney development market.
At 77–81 Yarranabbe Road
The 77–81 Yarranabbe Road project, being developed on a waterfront parcel on the northern face of the Darling Point peninsula, is among the most closely watched residential developments on Sydney Harbour. The site was assembled by Henroth Investments — the private Sydney investment vehicle of the Roth family — in a major acquisition in 2023, and the design brief was given to Takada's studio shortly afterwards. It is the studio's first substantial project on the Darling Point peninsula and, by site, one of the most prominent harbourfront residential commissions in recent Sydney history.
For a peninsula that has absorbed new architecture slowly and with a preference for quietness, the involvement of a designer of Takada's international profile is itself notable. The site's visibility from the harbour ensures that the project will be read — for better or for worse — as a statement about how the peninsula treats its last substantial waterfront parcel.