Discovering Danks Street

Forget your Oxford Street, Paddington, or Darling Street, Balmain. Danks Street, Waterloo, has become one of Sydney’s most popular precincts. It’s full of art galleries, antique stores, homewares outlets, caf?and restaurants.

Danks Street bubbled up and then exploded, Danks Street regular, film producer Louise Smith, says. It’s somewhere very exciting. Different. I fell in love with it.

Smith, 32, of Bondi, describes Danks Street as a little discovery on the edge of the Hillsong Church, industrial areas, the car yards and the Housing Commission.

For six years I drove past the top of Danks Street every day on my way to work in Redfern. I never knew what lay further down. Last week I made three exploration trips there in two days. I’m another Danks Street convert.

In the past three years Danks Street has become a niche pocket for the gay community, real estate agent Marc Fitzpatrick, general manager of Liberty Property Services, says. At least 50 percent of my clients are gay. Sixty to 70 percent of our sales are to gay people.

Actors and sportsmen including former Olympic swimmer Brett Hawke have also bought into the area.

Just 27, Fitzpatrick has been in real estate for 10 years. He explains that people are coming to the area because just streets away in nearby in Surry Hills you pay $700 a week for a two-bedroom apartment without views. In Waterloo the same apartment with city views costs $620. Both apartments are the work of the same developer and builder.

Green Square railway station is just 10 minutes’ walk away, buses pass nearby and the CBD is under five kilometres.

His ground floor office, 501, at Warehouse 5 (W5), 12 Danks St, is in a spectacular galvanised steel building. Once a joinery warehouse, it has kept its industrial feel in the most pleasant way. There are 127 apartments -“ selling for $350,000 and $400,000 -“ and seven Soho apartments used as offices in the complex.

Just a couple of buildings away from Liberty you find Salvage. It opened a year ago and reclaims historical architectural materials, furnishings and other decorations to reuse in contemporary design. Its sister shop in Newstead, Brisbane, opened four years earlier after owner Jim Ruig and his wife Leigh returned from Argentina. They had gone there so Jim could play polo. Jim Ruig explains: We met a secondhand antique dealer and bought doors and windows. They went like hot cakes back in Australia.

Overseas buying trips now occur five times a year.

The favourite piece of Belinda Cendron, Sydney showroom manager, is a half-ton early-1900s Carrara marble bath. While still on the showroom floor the day I visited, it had just been sold and was due for collection in the next couple of days.

Cendron says: A couple came in and jumped in it. Wiggled a bit and loved it too. They paid $22,000.

She points out that Salvage is a design source for architects, builders, designers and home owners. Cendron explains that often they are approached by people not knowing what they want. We find architectural elements to make their projects unique.

Walk further into the impressive 2 Danks Street complex and you find Brenda May’s art gallery. The complex is an excellent destination for visitors, May says. It’s halfway between the city and the airport. It has 10 autonomous, diverse galleries run by like-minded people who all show living artists. There’s everything from Aboriginal art to photographs.

May has been in the complex since it opened in 2001. She represents a small group of established artists including Robert Boynes, Jim Croke and Sybil Curtis.

May who has owned galleries for 22 years is enthused by the support she gets from the local gay community. She adds that she has been a supporter of the gay community since she was 15 when she started out in the fashion industry. However, she does not actively seek gay artists. Good art is good art, she says. Gay people make time for the arts.

There were two exhibitions on show when I visited. One was paintings about adolescence by gay artist Marc Standing and the other included small collages of cows and large posters by Al Munro. Standing’s paintings sell from $360 to $5,400. Munro’s works were selling at between $145 and $1,200.

For the past two years the area has hosted an October festival. Last year’s festival even included a skate competition and festival ambassador Jared Ingersoll, the executive chef of Danks Street Depot, served a three-metre-long schiatta, a Tuscan flatbread weighing about 1.5 kilograms and stuffed with corned beef and pickled coleslaw.

Depot’s bar menu lists my favourite, a traditional toasted Ruben sandwich -“ corned beef, sauerkraut, and tilsit cheese -“ for $12. The dinner menu lists dishes like organic chicken ($28) and Suffolk lamb loin and cutlet ($32). A champagne cocktail is $12.50.

The Danks Street Depot was established in February 2002 by Ingersoll and his wife, Melanie Starr. It was chosen by Tourism New South Wales and Vogue magazine as a must when visiting New South Wales.

Louise Smith’s favourite eatery is on the other side of Danks Street, the all-Italian Caf?opra at number 7. Smith says she loves the windows, the light, the food. You could be somewhere else, not Sydney.

You walk through the McDonald brothers’ warehouse car park where the female toilet welcomes you with a huge garbage tin of beautiful lilies, through to a grocery emporium, Fratelli Fresh. It has everything from fresh vegetables to pizza bases. Climb the stairs. Then through the Italian groceries to the restaurant.

On Smith and Fitzpatrick’s recommendations I make my way to Sopra at 11am for an early lunch to avoid the lines that build up a little later. There are no reservations.

Mains are mostly $18 and desserts mostly $12. I settle for linguine and saut? prawns with lemon, garlic and chilli, followed by tiramisu. They are delicious and very rich. The chef, Andy Bunn, is British.

So I come to the end of my third Danks Street discovery tour. The unexplored possibilities are endless. I’ll be back to look further at the real estate, the galleries and the homewares, but most of all I’ll be back for that Ruben sandwich.