Randwick has more flats than almost anywhere in Sydney. At the 2021 Census, 74 percent of the council area's dwellings were medium or high density, against 46 percent across Greater Sydney, and only a quarter were separate houses.
Most kitchen and bathroom renovators build for houses. A unit in a three-storey block is a different job, and the building sets most of the terms.
What is different about renovating in Randwick
Three storeys, and no lift
One block type defines Randwick, Kensington, Kingsford and Coogee. Council's own design manual describes it: a long narrow building put up in the 1960s and 70s on a former house lot, a row of garages at ground level, and three levels of flats above, three being the most that could be built without a lift. That decides how the job runs before anyone picks a tile. Cabinetry, stone, tiles and demolition waste all move on the stairs by hand, so deliveries get sized to what two people can carry up three flights, and the strip-out leaves the way the new material came in.
The rooms were drawn small on purpose
Randwick Council's assessment of its own 1950s to 1970s flats lists compartmentalised kitchens and living areas, small rooms, and large areas given over to laundries and corridors at the expense of living space. Most of what you gain in one of these apartments comes from reclaiming that wasted plan: drawers instead of cupboards along the long run, overhead cabinets taken to the ceiling line, a laundry that stops eating a room it never needed. The same report calls the structures solid and well built, which is why the shell almost always stays.
Art deco blocks, conservation areas, Anzac Parade towers
Randwick had a flat boom before the walk-ups. The 1920s and 30s blocks are brown brick with ornate plasterwork and high ceilings, and the council rates them as better built than what followed. Twenty-one heritage conservation areas cover parts of the city, The Spot, North Randwick, Randwick Junction, High Cross and West Kensington among them, so anything visible from the street in those blocks carries a heritage check first. Further down Anzac Parade at Kensington and Kingsford the stock is newer and taller, mixed-use buildings of six to ten storeys, where the constraints are booked service lifts and loading dock windows instead of a staircase.
This is the part we carry. Thirty years and more than 1,000 Sydney apartments, and the building side of the job is ours: the strata application and the by-law, the strata manager, the access and work hours, and the waterproofing certificate at handover. Fine Touch Group holds NSW Builder Licence 151772C.
