One For All

Architect Emili Fox covered every base when she designed her own home: it’s sustainable, multi-generational and incredibly beautiful.

- Judy Pascoe

Being your own client can be incredibly difficult for an architect or interior designer: having a multitude of ideas and choices can lead to indecision and thus inertia. Not so for architect Emili Fox, director of Fox Johnston, who has just completed a stellar rebuild of her own home in Sydney’s inner west.

Having lived in the rundown house on a steeply sloping block with her husband, cameraman and photographer Reiner Schuster, and their two children, Noah, 13, and Andie, 11, for four years, it was finally time for action. With notions of modest living, sustainability and the desire to provide potential accommodation for parents and parents-in-law, there was much to contemplate.

Keen to mine the potential of a block that has two separate points of street access, Emili devised a plan for a house with a self-contained dual-key suite and garage on the lower two levels that form a podium for the two-storey main home above.

“We live on the ground and upper floor, and there is an apartment and a guest suite for our parents or other visitors below,” says Emili. “The design gives as much connection or separation as we all need. At first my husband joked that I’d designed a hotel – but he now realises how well the arrangement works.”