Whale Beach Screen, Whale Beach House

by Caroline Casey

2007

‘I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moon like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans feathers’.
Gerald Malcolm Durrell, 1978

Perched high up on a cliff the Whale Beach house is designed to capture long distant unencumbered views. Ocean meets horizon line, horizon line meets sky. A bird’s eye view of evolving cycles in nature—sun and moon, weather and tides. Nine tapering solid oregan poles, each six meters high, are positioned between two flights of stairs and turned precisely at 10 degrees. Painted half in high gloss white to reflect light and half left natural to absorb light, they symbolise the moon in its phases—half illuminated, half in shadow. Each pole becomes a marker of the moon cycle, a quiet reference to its continuous rhythms of light and dark. Natural light filters through the poles, funnelling gently down to the lower level.