Norfolk

The site at 22 Yarranabbe Road sits on the inner curve of the peninsula's northern shore, a short walk along the road from Glenhurst Gardens and within sight of the city across Rushcutters Bay. The previous building on the site was a small post-war apartment block; the new project, completed for occupation in early 2025, replaces it with three full-floor harbourfront residences arranged over a single building.

The architects

PopovBass, the Sydney studio of Alexander Popov and Erica Bass, has produced over the past two decades a small body of residential work that has defined a particular Sydney sensibility: the controlled palette of stone, timber and white-painted plaster; the deep balconies and the long horizontal roofline; the quiet preference for view, light and proportion over surface ornament. Norfolk belongs to that body of work. The building is reserved at the street and generous at the harbour: a low silhouette behind a planted front, with the principal apartments oriented north across the bay.

The plans give each residence the full footprint of a floor — three bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, a wine cellar, double secure parking — with a deep waterfront balcony running the length of the harbour elevation. The interiors are by the same studio, in the same controlled palette: a continuous architectural decision from street kerb to the inside of every cupboard.

A peninsula category of its own

Norfolk belongs to a category of project that the Darling Point peninsula has always preferred to build but rarely finds well executed: small boutique buildings of three to ten residences, on single harbourfront sites, designed and detailed at the standard of a custom house. The peninsula's stock of comparable buildings is short — the great majority of the apartment density on Yarranabbe Road is from the 1950s and 60s, substantially larger and substantially less considered. Norfolk is one of the very few new buildings on the road that approaches the architectural standard of the older houses around it.

The marketing campaign for the residences has been handled discreetly, in the manner customary to the peninsula, with most of the trades understood to have been concluded ahead of any open campaign — the ordinary pattern at the upper end of the postcode.