Material integrity at SJB’s Billyard Avenue

At Billyard Avenue in Elizabeth Bay, SJB approaches luxury apartment living with a material permanence. Natural stone establishes the project’s interiors, where fluted detailing, mosaic floors and sculpted bullnose edges reinterpret the language of 1930s craftsmanship. Sourced in collaboration with Anterior XL, the palette balances expressive and restrained stones to create spaces designed to endure beyond trends.

Located among Elizabeth Bay’s celebrated collection of 1930s apartment buildings, Billyard Avenue sits within one of Sydney’s earliest and most established apartment neighbourhoods. Rather than replicate the area’s Art Deco architecture, the design interprets its character in a contemporary way, drawing on proportion, craftsmanship and material richness. It makes for a building that acknowledges its context while expressing a distinctly modern sensibility.

Inside, the apartments are conceived to feel more like private homes than conventional apartments. Generous floorplans unfold through a sequence of thresholds, corridors and rooms, creating spatial variety and moments of transition throughout the interior. Stone plays a central role in defining these spaces, lending a sense of permanence and a tactile richness to kitchens, bathrooms and circulation areas.

The material palette is deliberately restrained, favouring stones that sit outside the cycle of fashion. A rich Nero Marquina marble, softly neutral Savannah limestone and several varieties of Calacatta form the core of the selection, creating a balanced composition of dark, light and softly veined surfaces. These materials are used with careful detailing, including fluted elements and substantial bullnose edges that reference the craftsmanship of earlier architectural eras.

Behind the scenes, the collaboration between Anterior XL and SJB was highly iterative. Rather than working solely from small samples or standard specifications, the process involved selecting from full slabs and refining the palette to suit both the design intent and the technical demands of the project.

For Anterior XL, Billyard Avenue reflects a broader philosophy: that natural stone should be approached with both expertise and restraint. Each slab is inherently unique, and understanding how it will age, perform and interact with the architecture is central to the specification process. The aim is not simply to supply material, but to work alongside designers to realise a cohesive architectural vision.