The fantastic experience of being in this house is that constant changing drama of nature and when
you're this close to the beach, actually perched up against the sand, nestled in to the headland,
that wildness of the Australian coastal landscape is 100% experienced in this house. I'm Polly
Harbison, from Polly Harbison Design and I'm the architect for this project at MacMasters Beach.
The house is located on a beautiful coastal site overlooking MacMasters Beach on Darkinjung
country. MacMasters is a really small, sleepy coastal town, a couple of hours north of Sydney.
A core principal in our projects and work is this idea of barefoot luxury,
everything in this house was designed to go back to those core principles of
how can we do it simply, how can we do it in a really relaxed beach atmosphere and
again so fortunate to have builders and crafts people that could really make that a reality.
So now when you arrive on the site you go up a cantilevered concrete stair from a green
wall that acts as a bit of a a barrier to the rest of the world and the privacy of the home,
you come up the stairs and enter onto this stone tiled platform that really wraps around the house,
creating different external areas each with their own microclimate and the living, kitchen dining
space itself is is a room that's very carefully proportioned that when it actually opens up and
all the doors are slid back, really acts almost as a veranda, this open plan kitchen, living,
dining space the really the heart of this home, carefully balances the beauty of the ocean with
the beauty of greenery and the garden. When you go upstairs to the more adult world, I guess again we
use that trick of sometimes smaller can actually be better, there are two bedrooms up there and
neither of them are particularly large but they have very large and generous windows and you can
be lying in bed and you actually feel as if you are in that ocean, the kind of proportion of the
room to the proportion of ocean is quite dramatic. So the kids bedrooms and area downstairs is really
robust, the beauty of it comes from this large generous lawn that the rooms open up onto so that
the kids really could spill out from inside and play out on the lawn and then wander down to the
beach. That sequence of coming up from the beach, you can enter into that downstairs breezeway area,
it almost feels a bit indoor outdoor with its big sliding timber screen door and timber decking
makes that kind of breezeway space a really kind of practical functional entry to a beach house.
My name is Tim Paterson and I was the site supervisor on this project. The
build-ability of Polly's designs from a builder's point of view,
amazing, she just lets the materials speak for themselves basically. With a project like this,
a lot of the structure being the finished product there was no room to hide, everything had to be
I guess spot on otherwise you would see it in the finished product, so the project called for a lot
of off-form concrete, the board form finishes to the ceiling and the exposed eaves were challenging
but very rewarding process to go through. We salvaged some timber during demolition,
as much as we could we tried to bring some some of the old house into the new, so small shelves,
study desk up in the main bedroom and wherever we could basically we tried to reuse.
When I first saw the site, the the characteristic that really we wanted to enhance and treat very
preciously was the remnant pocket of bush, the way the building was conceived of and
designed was to keep the footprint as small as possible so that we could retain as much of the
existing vegetation on the site and indeed regenerate it. Michael Cook, the landscaper,
was absolutely instrumental in the success of this project because the project is as much
about the garden as it is about the house. The thing I'm most proud about this house is
that it's not too big and it's not too small, it strikes that balance between accommodating the
family and providing them all the essentials that they need to enjoy their holiday but it hasn't
lost that idea of it being an Australian beach shack, a simple, humble structure.