A-House
Typology: Weekender
Location: South Bruny Island, Australia
Size: 540m²
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Congregations of friends and family is an innate human ritual that spans across cultures. How could we facilitate our most precious moments and make them as memorable as possible?
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Throughout the design process we constantly wanted to connect people with the surrounding environment without compromising the comfort of the interiors. We also knew a house of this size had to be able to adapt to various group sizes, from couples looking to disconnect for the weekend to larger families looking to entertain and gather.
We deliberately didn't cram the home with as many rooms as possible but rather allowed the openness and bigness of the spaces to connect people within. We pulled this all together under a roof form that was shaped to respond to the sun, land and wind to capitalise on a local climate's conditions to make the interiors as comfortable as possible.
Comfort:
When designing big spaces, comfort can be the first thing to be compromised, especially from a heating and cooling perspective. We iterated and designed multiple roof shapes that give a balance between connection and openness to the landscape whilst regulating just enough sunlight into different parts of the interior.
The roof transforms from flat and horizontal at the back to closed, private and protective toward the front. At the rear the roof opens itself up to the sky allowing views out from the studio and bedrooms on level one. We also did this to capitalise on lower sun angles in the winter months to heat up the sleeping spaces during the morning hours.
At the front of the house, we pinched the roof down into a closed gable form to shade and protect the main living room and main outdoor deck from hot direct summer sunlight. As the roof pitch gets greater toward the front of the home, the timber louvres open up to allow views outward into the landscape.
Landscape:
The preservation of the landscape was fundamental in understanding how the design of the house would look. We wanted to create as little disturbance as possible and narrowed our structural piling to 92 locations. We stepped the house down with the landscape and worked with the topography rather than burying the house into the earth.
One of the ways we broke down the bigness of the interior living spaces was to register this stepping to break the interior spaces up through multiple level changes.
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Our goal was to keep the interiors as open and undisrupted as possible. We constantly asked ourselves - how open is too open? The social spaces at the front are kept free-flowing and as you move toward the back of the home, the space becomes partitioned to give privacy to the bedrooms and bathrooms.
This openness also allowed the interior to be completely naturally ventilated. We incorporated a fully operable timber and glass facade system on both long elevations which can open up to bring in light and air, or be shut when needed.
Materiality:
To further embed the house in its surroundings, we brought the materiality from nature in to create a gentle and natural interior. This minimal palette of materials consists of timber, rammed earth, glass, and concete. The hearth is a rammed earth structural wall at the centre of the home which on one side has a carved out fireplace for the library and on the other holds the kitchen and food store.
