Relax - Quirky and quaint

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Quirky and quaint

By Clarissa Tan, The Business Times | Thu, Feb 4 2010

Talk a walk in Sydney's outer-lying pockets and discover a world of bohemian charms.

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[Above: Terrace houses and a quaint convenience store at Surry Hills.]

SYDNEY'S more bohemian areas - Potts Point, Surry Hills, Newtown, Dank Street - are brimming with vintage fashion, antiques, art, rare books and good ol' fashioned coffee.

Sydneysiders know there are many sides to their city. There's the grittier, quainter, more bohemian side, for example, where much of the art, music, literature and first-rate organic espresso gets created.

To explore this aspect of the metropolis, you must wander away from the Opera House and the central business district, and poke around the outer-lying pockets of Potts Point, Surry Hills and Newtown.

To be sure, the village-like atmosphere of these areas is already succumbing to the onslaught of yuppiedom. But in a strange way, seeing a briefcase-lugging banker lining up for a latte next to a sandwich-munching drag queen is all part of the charm.

Potts Point

Some experts, not least the good people at The New York Times, say that Potts Point is to Sydney what the Left Bank is to Paris (minus the mist and the snootiness, presumably). It's true that this quarter, which funnily yet fittingly borders the flashy entertainment precinct of Kings Cross, has an intellectual flavour.

The thing to buy here, of course, is books. If you see a tiny store wedged in between two restaurants on 103 Macleay Street, bearing a sign that just says 'Bookshop', don't walk on by.

This is one of Sydney's best-loved bookstores, established since the 1950s, and what it lacks in size it makes up for in wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling shelves creaking with well-selected novels, biographies, poetry collections and historical and philosophical essays.

Not only does the store feature books, it gets featured in books too: it's constantly being mentioned in Australian literature and memoirs.

The Yellow House Bistro in Sydney, Australia.

Another good bookstore, also on Macleay Street, is the much slicker-in-appearance Potts Point Bookshop. There are also art galleries aplenty, such as the excellent Martin Browne Fine Art, which exhibits contemporary Australian and international works and is currently hosting a creepily beautiful show called Strangeland.

Where to stop for refreshments? Nowhere is more apt than the Yellow House Bistro, named after a nearby apartment building called Yellow House, which in turn was christened after Van Gogh's studio.

In the early 1970s, Sydney's Yellow House was home to a well-known, radical commune started by the artist Martin Sharpe, where the apartment itself acted as a canvas for the artists' works.