Conceived as a weekend retreat for 2 extended families and friends, this dwelling is discreetly hidden from the main road traffic by a dense thicket of coastal casuarinas On crossing this threshold the visitor emerges into a long straight treed avenue which creates a formal edge to a more casual indigenous landscape and begins to frame distant views of Westernport Bay.
The drive peels off into a generous Porte Cochere contained by an earth berm and casuarinas grove to the west and the house to the east, extends undulating rammed earth walls and a low spreading canopy as a gesture of enclosure and welcome.
Courtyards behind those walls are consequently protected from the south-westerly squalls. The house perches on the elevated edge of a gentle incline falling down to a sandy beach. It seems to be temporarily poised in its restless search for balance between convergence and divergence: the need for transparency, expansive views and wider connections and conversely the need for intimacy, refuge and enclosure.
Externally this is expressed as a series of swirling rooves riding each other like waves, each one straining to see over the other, washing over an earth-wall base which flexes back on itself anchoring against the tidal flux.
Inside, the plan fans, unfolding, bending and gathering its inner space before connecting with the outer foreground of grasses, the middle distance of coastal scrub and the long thin dissolving horizon of bay, island and sky.
The interior has its own geology- a sense of being hollowed out of the living earth cave-like, but with multiple interconnecting and overlapping chambers each with its own particular purpose and as one moves and pauses, its own dynamic shifting apertures to land sea and sky.
Through a simultaneous experience of radial expansion with the wider environment and convergent focus of this same environment, it was hoped that the site and its multi-various forces might become palpable and meaningful to the in-dweller and so over time offer many small epiphanies of self, others and spirit of place.
Mornington Peninsula, Victoria1999
Private