Head to Head examines Sydney’s Renovationitis

This week’s topic: ‘That Sydney suffers from an acute case of renovationitis’

Peter Whitehead

This week’s topic has got me right where I live.
In the late ’80s I started scraping paint from my window sills to reveal beautiful native timber. Soon afterwards I dismantled the kitchen with a screwdriver and a clawhammer. Two decades later, despite the assistance of various lodgers, partners, friends, my bother-in-law the builder and his brother the joiner, architects, the posse of Polish painters lacking the language skills to understand a word of my spouse’s splenetic tirade, various chippies, sparkies, and Colin [grinning and aping falling as he dismissed my concerns that the slope on the bathroom floor should be sufficient to make the wall-length industrial drainage gutter relevant ‘ which it isn’t and won’t be until the ridiculously priced marble is taken up and the whole blankety blinking blank thing started from scratch again by somebody with a functioning spirit level and half a brain] I live in an ongoing work in progress ‘ my description, not my wife’s. I have no right to throw stones.
But I do feel able to counsel a fellow sufferer, especially one as fussy and insecure as my City of Sydney.
Like a Double Bay dame desperate for shots of Botox to eliminate the lines furrowing her countenance when she confronts a mirror, our municipal leaders pursue self-harming solutions to problems of perception.
Fitzroy Gardens and the Woolloomooloo end of Forbes Street have distracted our civic titivators. These places may not be perfect, lacking, perhaps, a certain granite, but they function.
Perhaps prolonged periods of barricades and earthworks will relocate transients from these precincts, but isn’t it time City Hall found a better way to deal with problems than annoying them away’ Such tactics have only hurt the innocent in Oxford Street and Darlinghurst Road, leaving gutted retail strips.
Renovation is good when problems are prioritised and solved.
This simple truth struck me about the same time as that Wenge veneer cupboard door my brother-in-law’s brother promised to fix before Christmas 2007.
It must be a citizen’s responsibility to promote renovation while condemning the fluffing excesses of renovationitis.

Andrew Woodhouse
Why do we worship the new’ Sydney is driven by a $20 billion dollar-a-year renovation industry with more than 50% of owners renovating sometime in their life. In Sydney, almost everyone’s a developer and, for major developers, a good block is always an empty block.

Jenner, Potts Point, an 1871 Edmund Blacket marine villa, and subject to a DA which would butcher its original north wing and heritage-listed gardens, can be seen as renovation masquerading as restoration.

Renovationitis, or the R bug, is a pathological medical condition and a money-motivated addiction. There is no known cure. Symptoms include an unstoppable desire for change for change’s sake.

Like all addictions, wider communities often suffer.

Architects, desperate for work, are also spreading the R bug. Their symbiosis with developers is like a gnat looking for lunch on a rhino’s back.

Real estate agents also have it with ads screaming ‘Renovators’ Delight !’
Now governments have it. Proposals to ‘renovate’ Darling Harbour and removelish the famous swinging Glebe Island bridge are anti-heritage.

Councillor Marcelle Hoff opposes this on heritage grounds yet she voted for section 1.13 of council’s heritage control plan. This rule allows demolition of heritage on economic grounds. Her Janus-faced hypocrisy stymies chances of her enthronement as the next Lord Mayor.

Sydney Council itself is also infected. Plans for ‘Little Italy’, Stanley Street, Darlinghurst, were laughable. Council wouldn’t even consider them. Cheap flouro lights, sub-standard paving, more flagism are calculated insults to our Italian/Australian heritage. Shelved, deo gratias.

And so-called ‘renovations’ planned for Fitzroy Gardens, Kings Cross, will bulldoze heritage-listed, thumb-printed convict bricks and 1830s Macleay garden remnants, as designers work from their ‘good-block-is-an-empty-block’ theorem.

They have a sense of space but no sense of place.

So I’m going back to the lab to design a public panacea, a pill to cure the R bug: it’s based on a more mature perspective and tighter heritage controls.