The Eastern Suburbs is two renovation markets sharing a postcode range. One is the walk-up belt behind the beaches. The other is the harbourside blocks on the peninsulas.
Both are apartments, and apartments are a different build from houses. The building decides more of the job than the design does.
What is different about renovating in the Eastern Suburbs
The beach belt is small blocks and stairs
Apartments are the housing stock here. At the 2021 Census, 85.7 percent of occupied dwellings in Bondi Beach were flats or apartments, 79.9 percent in Coogee, 79.6 percent in Bondi and 68.3 percent in Randwick, against 21.7 percent across NSW. Much of the Bondi stock is interwar: Waverley Council's own design guidelines record the second highest density of interwar buildings in Sydney, drawn from a typology study of around 600 blocks.
Blocks that small and that old have no lift, and the missing lift sets the program. Our Bondi Beach bathroom went into a three-storey block of six units and our Randwick job into a 1960s block of twelve, so board, tile, joinery and every bag of demolition waste moved by hand. Deliveries get sized to two people and three flights and sequenced to the work rather than dropped in one load. Original wiring and plumbing turn up behind the walls on strip-out, so we carry a 15 to 20 percent contingency on blocks of that age and say so before you sign.
Harbourside buildings run on one lift and a shared riser
Woollahra Council's heritage studies record post-war high-rise apartment buildings across the municipality, notably on Darling Point, put up as the large houses on large harbour sites came down. The Point Piper apartment we rebuilt sits in a 1960s harbour-front block of that generation, and buildings like it set their own rules. One lift serves every resident, so stone, joinery, tiles and the entire old kitchen move through it in booked windows, and the parking is a basement bay with a height limit rather than a driveway a truck can back into. Wet areas of that era run off shared risers, so a bathroom rebuild works with the falls and pipe positions the original plan allows.
Conservation areas, and the salt
Three councils cover most of the region and all three run heritage conservation areas: 17 in Waverley including Bondi Beach, 15 in Woollahra with Paddington and Watsons Bay the largest, and around 20 in Randwick. Interiors are usually clear of them. Anything that changes the outside of the building, windows and balcony work in particular, answers the council question before the strata one. The coast adds a constraint with no paperwork attached: AS 4312 grades atmospheric corrosivity by distance from the shoreline, so tapware, screen fixings and exhaust hardware near the beach get specified for the location it has to survive.
None of that lands on you. Over 30 years and more than 1,000 Sydney apartments, the building side of the job has been ours to run: the strata application and the by-law, the strata manager, the lift booking, the work hours the scheme allows, and the waterproofing certificate at handover. Fine Touch Group holds NSW Builder Licence 151772C.
