Brief: To create a new holiday home for a retired couple, their adult children and grandchildren. The beach house needed to be sympathetic to the area, cater for storage of all manner of watercraft and games, adaptable to comfortably accommodate two persons during the cooler months, and up to 18 persons when the whole family arrive for Christmas.

Challenges:  While needing to be open to ocean breezes and summer sunshine, the cold exposed coastline of Cape Paterson, facing south towards Bass Strait, needed to be factored into the design. The corner site with two street frontages has a mature garden to the south of the site that the owners wanted to retain and celebrate in the new house. The need to create an easily isolatable master bedroom to escape the noise of a full house or to heat efficiently when there are only two people staying.

Solutions: A T-shaped plan addresses the street and mature trees to the south and provides separate outdoor living spaces that function across the seasons – south garden for summer and north garden for cooler months. To respond to the exposed site, fibro beach-shack vernacular and owner-builder construction, a simple structural solution and robust material pallet of concrete block and battened fibre cement was proposed, which is easy to install and maintain.

Highlights: Working in such an incredible landscape and integrating built forms within it to design a simple, honest and beautiful home which acts as a services hub, a kind of permanent campsite, connecting outdoor spaces to everyday living.

RF