I love the gates opening, driving in coming around the corner, getting peeks of the house through the
trees and driving into the carport, it's like a big you know exhale and just go, ah I'm home.
We always knew at some point we'd build a house here. It was a family home and
by that it needed to be a place where we stay together, we eat together we are all
you know within arms reach of each other and that way we spend time together. My
name is Paul Di Natale, I'm the director of Lexicon and also the client on this project.
No it's really easy to building your own home, well at least for me, you know what
your objectives are, you know what resources, materials and options you have around you,
and so you bring all that together, you know really in a very short thought process. I have
worked with Bruce for I'd say 10 to 15 years, I understand his design, understand what he's
trying to achieve, he's got really good strength with creating form and creating space.
My name is Elaheh Mohamed I'm an architect at Aktis, I'm Bruce Katsipidis I'm a director at Aktis and we're
the design architects of the project, welcome to Merricks House. Merricks is down on the Mornington
Peninsula in Victoria, it's predominantly a rural area about an hour out of Melbourne,
it's a very beautiful part of Victoria. We're 1 and half to 2 km to Western Port Bay,
the Eastern side is a lot more rural, a lot more open, a lot of vineyards and small hobby
farms as well. We've done a lot of work with Paul before and we understand each other fairly well
so the brief was basically fairly simple, wanted a four-bedroom house, from the start we both agreed
on a a lineal form because it was just appropriate to the area here. Although it's a large site we
were actually quite restricted by the flood plane so it helped really place the building,
originally we were thinking of it as the half submerged building because of various reasons,
we ended up building it just sat on the highest part of the land. You enter through the middle of
the house, to the left we move into the parents areas, you can go to the right downstairs to a
service area and as you come into the living room which contains the kitchen, dining area there's a
courtyard which separates the children's quarters and that's a sitting area, pool area, everything's
on the one level and there's a continuous flow of space I think from one area to another.
The masonry really forms the base box, we achieve that by keeping all the walls, the masonry walls,
at the one height. The raking roof is just a separate element which appears to be floating
mainly because of the way we've glazed the areas in between the two elements, coming back to the
circular windows they're just another geometric form, the contrast creates a certain tension on
the elevations, creates a balance and it's a little bit more playful I guess than the
strong square forms that exist everywhere else. What we tried to do is bring in the outside to
the interior of the building and that determine the layout in a way as well, it allowed us to
actually keep the floor area fairly small in the sense that there are no corridors, the rooms are
quite separate even though they flow into each other and walking from one room to the other
you've always got the the landscape that just the continuous glass wall just helps achieve that.
The compromise is that we normally like to get Northern lighting for passive solar planning
reasons, so we had to achieve that through skylights and we used the courtyard to do
that as well so we brought in the pool and just creates some terrific shadows. I think that,
you know, it being south facing whilst many people say oh you know from a performance point of view
it should be North, the aspect that we get it just gets this beautiful you orangey glow to the grass,
to the trees, and even you know when the sun swings around in summer it starts
bouncing off the water in the pool and that reflects over the concrete columns,
it's just it it it's just a feeling that you get, you're in there in
with nature it's nice. We've got one side of the building which is fairly strong in
materiality and the other side which is just translucent just opens up to the landscape.
What we tried to do is detail things simply, everything's been well thought out, but we haven't
really gone into expensive detailing. The last place that we built was a lot of plaster board,
a lot of white, and maybe I was a little bit scarred from that, it was important to be just
using natural, honest materials and just use them throughout, even from the choice of tiles,
there's one tile that we've used in the wet areas and no more. Just to have fewer materials and less
of these kind of distractions everywhere and just to keep it feeling natural, warm, homely.
The landscape and what we're in you know is part of the home. We're here as custodians of it so we're
trying to do you our bit and leave it a little bit better than you know how it was when we got
here. Around the house are predominantly natives, it fits really well with all of the block work and
the timber, we spent a lot of time in removing a lot of the noxious weeds and re-vegetating with
indigenous stock, the only thing that we kept from the old house was a pizza oven that I built when
we first arrived, so in the summer we were out there the pizza oven's going, you look through
to the pool to the house and you can see right through it the way that Bruce has divided the
two buildings with a sort of pool and Courtyard through the center there's kids out playing in the
pool that you see in the distance and it's just a really nice way of that all sort of connecting.
We're very happy with the outcome, it's sort of exactly what we pictured. It was
a successful working relationship and I think it sort of shows in the outcome.