South Coast Beach House
By Rose Onans
Gazing out across a lagoon to the mountains beyond, South Coast Beach House transcends its immediate street context to offer an immersive experience of landscape within its meticulously crafted walls.
From the moment of arrival, South Coast Beach House begins to confound expectations. The gently winding streetscape could be that of any small Australian coastal town, bitumen road flanked by wide grassy verges and rows of detached houses – humble fibro shacks alongside much larger typical new builds. Into this familiar milieu, Casey Brown Architecture has inserted a building whose form instantly marks it as ‘other’, its front mass broken down into two brick halves, one recognizably a garage, the other an intriguing round volume. Unusually, there are no openings to this frontage aside from the main entrance, which divides the two. Stepped back from the facade, an undulating roof hovers above, indicating a second storey without imposing its presence. The result is a home that does not dominate the relaxed street context, despite its generous scale and robust materiality, and that feels different from the neighboring houses yet simultaneously at home on its site.
“It’s very much a building dictated by its constraints,” says project architect Daniel Weber. The brief was relatively open, but it sought a home where the clients, a couple, could holiday with their extended family and also eventually move into full time. As such, the house needed to accommodate many while also feeling comfortable for an occupation of just two, necessitating both large spaces for groups and smaller, more intimate areas, a generous main suite as well as a number of smaller bedrooms and a bunkroom. In order to fulfil this program, it had to make the most of the available space onsite while negotiating setbacks and an easement, which resulted in an irregular building envelope and feats of engineering to cantilever the second storey so as not to place footings on the easement.
These challenges influenced the design for the better, reflects Weber. “It’s good to have some parameters to work with,” he says, and these constraints ultimately became opportunities. The side setbacks, for example, meant that, while only the main suite has a view over the lagoon, the relatively tight site didn’t push the other bedrooms right to the boundary – rather, the side setbacks were used as “landscaped passages” that provide verdant views from each of these ground-floor bedrooms, Weber explains. The cantilevered upper floor, meanwhile, rises up above earthly constraints to stretch itself out toward the lagoon and the Great Dividing Range beyond.
For a house that has almost no apertures visible from the street, the views come as a surprise. Weber describes South Coast Beach House as an ‘interior’ building, in that the architecture is perceived from within far more so than it is experienced externally – the front elevation gives little away, and the rear elevation would be visible only from in the lagoon. Yet it is also a building that seems to place its inhabitants in the landscape; a carefully orchestrated experience of the outdoors is key to its interiority. Stepping through the front door, one looks down the hallway straight out to the lagoon immediately over the rear boundary. Then, making one’s way upstairs, the full panorama is experienced in a jaw-dropping moment of reveal.
Entering this elevated living pavilion, the neighboring houses are hidden from sight and all that is experienced is an immersion in the landscape – sunlight sparkling on water, green rolling hills dotted with grazing cows, the outline of the ranges etched against the sky. Fully retractable glazed doors make this upper level feel like an extension of the adjoining outdoor terrace. Overhead, the roof seems to hover weightlessly, a 360-degree band of glazing separating the walls from the roof, which is supported only by ultra-thin columns. “You get little glimpses out at the sky or the mountains from different angles through this glazing,” says Weber. “And then when the sun is low in the morning and evening, it comes right through the building, and you get these beautiful bands of light.”
Casey Brown was responsible for both architecture and interior design, right down custom-designing much of the furniture and many of the key fixtures, such as the front door handle and the inbuilt shower soap dishes. The unity of architectural and interior finishes, grounded in the practice’s emphasis on material honesty and connection to landscape, means that this ‘interior building’ feels both experientially and conceptually cohesive. The interior hard surfaces – stone, concrete, brick and timber – either flow seamlessly between inside and out or feature the same material but with a subtle change. The bricks, for example, were selected after “a slightly deranged search of every brick supplier in Australia and not in Australia to find something that was only beautiful and durable but spoke to the area,” says Weber. Externally, narrow cream bricks were meticulously laid horizontally with half the usual mortar joint width to create a soft, textural finish reminiscent of the character of the nearby sand dunes, while another, slightly darker, face brick used internally picks up the sand’s golden tones.
The interiors are not only neutral hues and architectural materials, however. Empowered by the clients’ trust, Casey Brown injected moments of intense colour. The entry seat and surrounding niche are coated with high-gloss blue automotive paint, also fulfilling the brief for a hardwearing, robust building. The in-built bar is revealed to be a dark cherry red when the discreet timber joinery door is opened, and red recurs in the light fitting and console in the main living space, this time in a burnt tomato hue. Perhaps most unexpected of all is the lift, which is drenched in bright yellow – the client’s favorite colour. “It was quite hilarious, [during construction] I get a call from the site foreman saying ‘there’s been a massive mistake; the lift’s turned up and it’s yellow!’” Weber recalls. “I had to reassure him that it was, in fact, correct.”
From these playful moments that enliven the interiors to the ambition of the engineering, the precision of the brickwork to the drama of the roofline, South Coast Beach House works across all scales to fulfil its intention to be a building for the ages. Robust and enduring, it is a place of connection – to landscape and each other – for its inhabitants.