Victorian holidays - design of holiday home in Australia's Phillip Island

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1995 by James Ash

A series of spaces intended for the contemplation and enjoyment of nature is strung out amid the sand dunes of an island off the south coast of Australia.

The shores of Phillip Island off Victoria in Australia have fine beaches with grassy dunes rising gently behind; there are very few trees. When Barrie Marshall of Denton Corker Marshall decided to build a holiday house here, he wanted to make a building quiet and elemental with `no architectural form to the outside. To the ocean the house is a wall, a piece of cliff, a slash of rock face into the dunes. The windows are scattered across the face. The roofline is ragged with windblown grass'.

This side of the house faces south, away from the sun. The north facade is one side of a 33 m square courtyard that has been formed by making three and a half metre high in-situ concrete walls and banking grass-covered sand against them outside. So in the middle of this Euclidian dune is a secret sunlit garden, and on its north side the house itself (little more than five metres deep) forms a transition between the quiet tamed court and the windy wildness of the beach gently sloping to the ocean 12 m below.

The interior has been made to emphasise and enhance the duality. Both main spaces, the living area to the east end of the strip, and the master bedroom to the west, open generously in both directions. Smaller spaces (lesser bedrooms, kitchen and utility area) look south to the sea and there is a long totally glazed south-facing kitchen/dining room next to the living area. The two ends are joined by a gallery lit by low level slits through which sun can spill on the floor; a sunroom (as yet unbuilt) is to project north of the dining area into the court.

For Marshall, the views through the openings become `the very essence of the building' and the spaces are `temporary resting places between inside and outside'. To this end, he has made materials extremely simple, severe even. The black concrete of the exterior is unadorned inside except for a hint of subtle luxury in the lead inlays of the tie bolt holes of the walls. Floors are of black terrazzo divided into a 300 mm grid by 16mm aluminium strips. Internal divisions are of horizontal plain galvanised sheet steel panels with vertical galvanised steel cover strip. (There are neoprene joints between partition elements round wet areas, which have white powder-coated silicone jointed aluminium panels inside.) Even the doors are covered in galvanised steel over solid timber cores.

This austere palette of materials would not be out of place in a prison. But here, it seems almost rich. Sunlight splashing onto the terrazzo, the matt dark concrete end walls quietly patterned with dark glossy metal, the silvery partitions subtly reflecting into the interiors the quite different lights and atmospheres of north and south: all help make a calm series of spaces poised between heaven and earth, between the ocean's roar and the quietness of the garden, yet which have a strange gentleness that enhances human presence on the edge of the world.