This bright Surry Hills home occupies an entire floor of Sydney’s historic Edwards & Co building.

Enormous windows, timber flooring and whitewashed walls make the $3.2m Sydney property – on the market with BresicWhitney – a classic piece of loft living. Its 210 sq m of space and high ceilings mean there’s room for both work and life, befitting its current resident, photographer Geoff Lung.

Lung has been using the apartment as his home and studio since the early 1990s, drawn to it after his experiences of similar buildings in New York.

‘I had shot in a lot of NYC studios and was taken by the architecture and beautiful warehouse spaces there,’ he says. ‘I was searching for a studio and I walked into this space, seeing the 5m ceilings with the large full-width windows and the amazing light. I knew it was right.’

Lung worked with New York studio Burley Katon Halliday to overhaul the interiors of the apartment – which was once the admin floor of the former tea warehouse, dating back to 1926. The studio’s alterations retained the raw, industrial charm of the space.

While the building’s abundance of light has made it a natural choice for photographers, over the years it’s also attracted its fair share of famous guests. Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise are rumoured to have dined in an apartment upstairs, and Baz Luhrmann hosted his wedding reception in the same space.

Read next: An island retreat by Ken Woolley in Sydney’s Pittwater goes on sale