In the mid 1990s, I read Robert Hughes’ Culture of Complaint, a book that in many ways forewarned of the pitfalls of the identity politics we see today. Specifically, it compared a combative multicultural dialogue in the USA, based on reinforcing difference with what he saw as a more cohesive cross-cultural project in Australia. A few years later, Richard Blyth wrote a foundational text for the practice that eschewed the Anglophone focus on objects in the landscape, embracing instead the complexity and indeterminacy that comes with a rich multicultural population.

Two decades on, and Noel Pearson’s conception of Australia as a place gifted with an Indigenous heritage, a British democracy and a multicultural society, is being tested. At least the architectural profession is finally starting to address questions of Country and to discuss spatial nuances in regard to gender. Yet, with the exception of two notable mosques by Glenn Murcutt and Candalepas Associates, we have not really seen a significant body of work address the complex fabric woven between diverse cultural groups. Multiculturalism raises important architectural questions, primary among them spatial organisation and formal language. For a country in which 40 percent of residents in the major cities doesn’t speak English at home, our architectural production remains strongly Anglo-centric.

Enter Alcami Architecture, a practice run by Victor Alcami, a Catalan architect who arrived in Australia more than 10 years ago as one of many architects who left Spain in the wake of the global financial crisis. In a decade here, amid various attempts to start a practice or to work for others, he met Bruno, a Spaniard who came to Australia 40 years ago and who introduced himself to Victor after hearing the architect speaking Catalan in the street. Some years of friendship later, Bruno asked Victor to design the renovation of his small Chippendale terrace.

The terrace extension is a well-known typology in Sydney and one that has seen so many iterations since the 1980s that it could be considered a field of limited interest. Everything that can be done has been done. Terrace House Mirage, designed by an architect from elsewhere for a client from elsewhere, breathes new life into the type. Victor’s sharp intelligence and perspective from abroad meant that he saw the terrace not as a Sydney question, nor as something imported from England: rather, it’s a Belgian typology that migrated to England before migrating here.

Victor observes that terrace houses are everywhere, “a typology from another time, from another place, for another climate, for people with other lives.”

Bruno’s family is from southern Spain – a place influenced by Arabic heritage – where domestic spaces are different to here. They featured courtyards that borrow landscape from adjacent neighbours, and spatial devices such as metal chains in doorways as flyscreens and roller blinds for sunshade and privacy. Bruno also likes orange. Victor’s renovation takes this unlikely mix of elements and adds in the mirrors of Adolf Loos’s American Bar in Vienna, the one-point perspective of Stanley Kubrick’s films, the indoor–outdoor connection of Donovan Hill’s D House and the bravery in materials and finishes of 1970s and 1980s Italian interiors – an expanded “cloud” of references and histories that he has almost magically coalesced into a surgically tight and cohesive project.