For years, the Sydney Antiques Centre was full of reminders of time, crowded with objects that had outlasted their owners. Now the building is a bathhouse, and the experience invites visitors to forget time altogether.
Sense of Self has recently opened its first Sydney home in Surry Hills, designed by architecture practice Ritz and Ghougassian. Below the street, the main stair draws you down into the bathhouse with rooms that feel excavated rather than built. The original brick walls and concrete columns carry the atmosphere, and new clay brick is threaded through so gently that old and new seem to have settled into one another. Finishes are natural and tactile, chosen for how they feel under hand and foot.
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Light is soft, so the eye relaxes and the other senses come forward. Incense hangs in the warm, damp air, and a series of soundscapes hums beneath everything. Hard surfaces that should send every splash and voice ringing, have been tuned to a murmur. Heat gives way to cold as you move from sauna to steam, pool and plunge. Somewhere in the building is a room reserved for listening, where cool blasts of air arrive like a change of scene.
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The experience is a kind of theatre, and one I felt I had a part in. When I arrived, the bathhouse held a good number of people, drifting between the pools and settling into the more private corners tucked around its edges, yet it never felt full. Later, the numbers thinned and I found myself alone. I had expected the space to feel empty, but instead, it closed around me, as though the performance had simply moved to a quieter act.
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Like any good production, the ease of it rests on a great deal of work offstage, resolved so carefully that it disappears.
There is no prescribed route – you choose your own sequence, and slowly it becomes a small ritual. Daylight arrives only as a glimpse through high windows, and a single clock turns its face away from the baths, so knowing the hour becomes a choice.
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Sense of Self first opened in Melbourne during the pandemic, at a time when being alone was rarely a choice, and its Sydney sibling turns solitude into something generous. When I finally left, I had no idea how long I had been there, and no wish to find out.