Hackford House 2 was a commission to replace an earlier house designed in 1980 by Gregory Burgess Architects and destroyed in the bushfires on Black Saturday, 7 February 2009.
The house occupies a peninsular of land between the original site adjacent to the creek, and a wildlife lake which was integral to the earlier landscape/architectural design. The original site, a sunken walled courtyard across which the earlier house was built like a bridge, will be re-landscaped as a memento-mori garden of reflection and renewal in memory of the client’s late wife and the devastating fires of Black Saturday.
While Hackford House 2 is a new design resistant to future bushfire attack (BA L-19), it has a familial lineage with the original in its geometry, appearance and intention.
The challenge again was to find expression for the client’s sense of home coming to approach, arrive, enter and feel a sense of well-being, and inner rejuvenation in a house that ‘felt at home’ in this beautiful valley and that they felt ‘at home’ in. To design a place, both refuge and eyrie, which concentrates and extends the forces of the surrounding landscape and inspires, nurtures and sustains a sense of transformation towards wholeness.
Koornalla, Victoria2011