Our Artarmon Apartment Renovation: A Full Case Study

Artarmon does not get talked about the way Mosman or Neutral Bay do, and the people who live there seem happy about it. A station on the North Shore line with the CBD about twenty minutes away, a village shopping strip split across both sides of the rail corridor, good Japanese restaurants sitting next to a fish and chip shop. Most of the suburb's apartment stock is on the western side of the line. That is where this project was, and this is how it ran, start to finish.

The project at a glance

Why Artarmon apartments are usually due for work

The train line splits the suburb in two, and it splits the housing with it. East of the line is mostly Federation homes and California bungalows. West of the line, closer to the station and the old light-industrial precinct that has been converted over the past few decades, is where the mid-rise and high-rise apartment buildings sit.

Plenty of those buildings went up while the area was still shifting from industrial to residential, which means solid, well-located blocks holding apartments that have not been touched since. Original kitchens, dated tiling, flooring that has carried thirty years of traffic. Artarmon also attracts owners who bought for the commute and the quiet rather than the finish, so these apartments tend to be lived in for a long stretch before anyone renovates. That was exactly the case here.

The brief: a fixed budget and a whole-apartment result

The client came to us with one hard constraint and one clear goal. The constraint was a tight budget that was not going to move. The goal was for the whole apartment to feel modern and finished, not for one room to be renovated while the rest stayed dated.

Those two things pull against each other, and the way you resolve them is by deciding early what you are not going to do. There was no structural work and no layout change. Both wet areas stayed in their original footprints, which meant no plumbing had to be relocated, no engineer was needed, and the approval pathway stayed simple. Every material was then chosen against two questions: does it look and wear like a premium finish, and does it cost like one. Where the answers differed, we bought the first.

The kitchen: a U-shape with the laundry inside the joinery

The kitchen was the anchor of the project and the room that solved a second problem. The apartment had a separate laundry area eating floor space in a home that did not have any to spare. We built the washing machine into the kitchen joinery behind a matching cabinet door, ran the plumbing to it during the fit-out, and gave that floor space back to the apartment.

The original cabinetry and benchtops came out and a U-shaped layout went in, designed to get more bench and storage out of the same footprint rather than to expand it. Expanding a kitchen in an apartment usually means moving services, and moving services means a by-law, an engineer and weeks of approval. On a fixed budget that is the first thing to rule out.

The bathroom: stripped to the studs and rewaterproofed

The bathroom followed the same thinking on finishes, with one exception. Modern fixtures, a simple palette, large-format tiles, a walk-in shower. What did not get value-engineered was the waterproofing. The room was stripped back and tanked to AS 3740 by a licensed waterproofer, with the whole floor membraned and the shower walls taken to height, because that is the one part of an apartment bathroom where a saving is not a saving.

Flooring and paint: the cheapest move that changed the most

This is the part the client singled out afterwards. One flooring product ran through the entire apartment rather than each room being treated as its own decision, paired with a full repaint in a single neutral tone.

In a smaller apartment, continuous flooring does more for how big the place feels than almost anything else you can buy. Every material change is a visual stop. Remove the stops and the eye runs from the entry to the balcony door without interruption, and the apartment reads as one space instead of four small ones. Against structural work it costs very little, which is why it is the first thing we protect in the budget rather than the first thing we trim.

What a renovation like this costs in Sydney

We do not publish individual client budgets, but here is the honest shape of it. A whole-apartment cosmetic renovation of this scope, meaning kitchen, bathroom, flooring and paint with no structural work, starts from $60,000. Single rooms cost less.

The full breakdown, including the strata and access costs that only apply in apartments, is in our Sydney apartment renovation cost guide.

Three things worth knowing before you renovate in Artarmon

1. 1.Budget contingency for what is behind the walls. The west-side buildings closest to the station are older stock. Even on a purely cosmetic job, expect to find original wiring and original plumbing once things come off. Carry 15 to 20 percent.
2. 2.Artarmon strata is usually reasonable, but the rules are the same. These committees tend to be less adversarial than the ones in premium harbourside towers. That changes the temperature, not the law. A bathroom still needs a special resolution and a registered by-law.
3. 3.Consistency beats a hero room. The single biggest lever on this project was not cutting corners anywhere. It was refusing to treat any one room as more important than the others.

Frequently asked questions