The thing that drew me to this land, was a craving to be very close to Montfort Beach
where I'd done a lot of surfing in the past and living here now we're enjoying a home
that has a really strong sense of light and outlook and gives a real feeling of space.
My name's Chris McKimm I'm a founding director of InForm and today we are at
our home the Montford House. So the Montford House is in
Blairgowrie and it's on top of a sand dune about 600 meters from the ocean.
This is one of seven houses that InForm and Pleysier Perkins designed on an eight acre site.
I retired from the company about two years ago but I started when I was
when I was 16 as an apprentice carpenter and I just had a desire to create a company that
had its own uniqueness and to offer architect design and quality houses
but to make them available to a wider portion of the population.
My introduction to Montford Beach was about 50 years ago when it was an unknown surf break.
I remember the very first day a friend and
I walked down there and we saw these incredible waves
Spent the whole day down there, we surfed I think three different times.
That just started a lifelong love of that beach for me.
But predominantly we wanted a home that really blended in with the environment because what is
most special about this location of Montford is the environment, but the house really had
to respond to that environment so there are two major things with regard to the brief,
one was the views to the South but the other challenge was the Winter sun to the North,
and further to that my wife and I knew that we would be living in the house a lot by ourselves
but we also knew that with four kids and five grandchildren we're going to
be inundated with a lot of people so the house was deliberately zoned to
cater for all of those people and their different aspects of living in the house.
So the design of the house starts with walking up the stairs from the front door with a deliberate
big window that gives anybody coming into the property for the first time a glimpse of the views
to the South, the stair on the other side leads down to the basement where we have a wine cellar
and then from that bridge we can turn left into the main bedroom suite
and if we turn right we come to the main living area and the main living area offers views
from either direction, then beyond that we have another suite of bedrooms and a second living area
and because of the fact that it gets rather windy up here, we have a deck to the South to enjoy the
views but if the wind is strong from the south we have a deck to the North to enjoy those views.
The garden was designed by Jack Merlot who had a very good understanding of
the site and he designed the pool in such a way that it's set down just a
little bit to really allow us to look over the pool to the views but also
made it immediately private from the neighbouring property to the West.
One of the biggest challenges in building here was our neighbour to the West and our neighbour
to the West used to enjoy the whole environment without a house next door so we agreed with the
neighbour to lower the house by about 2.4 meters and that enabled them to maintain their view of
Arthur's seat and whilst I was a little bit apprehensive to do it in the first place
because of the cost it actually really improved our environment and so much so that it gave us
a much bigger envelope but also protect us a bit more from the rather rugged environment down here.
The palette materiality of the home was predominantly on reflecting elements
of the surrounding vegetation
so the external brick walls take on a greyness similar to the trunks of the tea tree.
The timber ceilings reflect the natural timbers in the national
park and it was deliberately rather neutral so again the house wasn't the
dominant feature but the house reflected the environment upon which it was built.
One of the areas of this home that we get most enjoyment out of, is
sitting out in the southern deck with the southeasterly wind, a big ocean swell
and looking at the ever-changing sky and listening to the ocean.