So, Pearl Beach is a little village about one and a half hours north of Sydney and
it's a coastal village, it's on the beach but I guess i think what makes Pearl Beach
so unique is it's completely surrounded by national park and bush - that is
its defining character; this little village in the bush.
Our lovely clients, they'd owned the block for a while really was just the end piece of land right
on the edge of the national park surrounded by bush on three sides. What was really magic about
it is there's this incredibly beautiful patch of blue sky, actually there was a clearing.
I was just drawn to the clearing - that's where I wanted to sit, that's where you wanted to have
your cup of tea - you wanted to sit on a rock, in the sun, in the clearing, looking back at the
bush. And so the whole building, the whole way we even thought about conceptually this building
is that it's a masonry form that wraps around this sacred clearing, protects from fire and
the idea is that there is no garden - it is simply going to be a building that emerges
from the bush. And then on arrival that whole entry sequence is a series of contrasts so
the big timber sliding screens open up and you're in this compressed breezeway,
and then you turn and you go up the stairway and the stairway is outdoor and it's open to
the sky so you have this lovely moment that as you're ascending the stairs and you're going
up your eyes drawn up to the canopy of the plants and you get that completely separate experience.
And then at the front door itself, it compresses again. When you do open the door and you see
what's beyond with the house that opens right up, it's a complete contrast again so you're in
this light-filled very open area. And from that main living room when you then move through the
building, the view of the building slowly fans your eyes drawn down these corridors
to very linear windows that are about focusing the eye completely on the tree trunks.
Because we really did want to chase the sun and we wanted our living rooms and our
outdoor space to be as elevated as possible; the secondary spaces are tucked underneath.
As time passes in these dark moody spaces you just see plants in the bush singular plants get
light - there's little beams of light on and they kind of glow. You want to
be connected to all of these things. We have asked the bush to come right up to our walls,
it's a very immersive experience. There is the distant sound of the waves but the much more
predominant noises are those lovely ever-changing noises of the bush including the kookaburras.
Outdoor living is something I am completely passionate about. I'm passionate about it
in my work and it's also personally how I live, I live outdoors. We joked a lot
I said "right, I'll give you an indoor shower but I'll give you an outdoor one,
and I promise you, I absolutely promise you, you will never ever ever use the indoor shower."
"Oh, what if it's raining in winter when it's cold?" I said "I promise you, that's when it's the
best!" That joy of showering under moonlight for example is just something that gives you a little
bit of delight in your everyday life. We actually consider outdoor spaces as important as the indoor
spaces right from the get-go conceptually. We think about these spaces that they need a
floor and they need a wall and they need a roof and they need heating and they need cooling,
they need incredible attention to the microclimate that they're creating; shade, breeze, etcetera,
etcetera. And all these elements are then designed into these outdoor spaces and if you
do that you can actually change your microclimate and you can ensure that outdoor spaces are used.
The dilemma of the building is that it's got to respond to its beautiful bush site not only just
that we want to enjoy the bush but we also have to protect from it because we are in the flame zone.
It's got these thick masonry walls that wrap and protect with quite deep punctured framed
windows. Pearl Beach itself, the village, has this long history of these beautiful
timber pavilion buildings and I think that's what most people here are used
to but obviously they just cannot be replicated today with our sensibilities around bushfire,
and so I think it probably has been with the talk of Pearl Beach.
When Carl and Mimma first approached me to design their building they had quite a
strong vision and design dream if you want for this. Off-form concrete sculpture in the bush,
that's what they wanted. Off-form concrete to do, especially walls or an entire building
out of off-formed concrete, is actually an extraordinarily expensive material.
But what we can do is we can still try and achieve a beautiful homogeneous sculptural building in the
bush, but we can do a hybrid if you like - so it is this hybrid. There are elements of off from
concrete and then we've mixed it the predominant material in the walls is just a very humble
low-cost concrete block. Where the beauty and the movement of the project comes in the form
really is through texture and the way that the light responds to these large masonry walls.
This low-cost material has been elevated by taking a lot of care and how the blocks
were laid and just the attention to that mortar joint so that we get just the right texture and
movement when the light hits it. That allows us to have areas of deep recess and shadow.
Where we've brought little touches of warmth and colour into the building it was absolutely about
looking at the palette of our beautiful surrounding nature and then bringing all those
browns and greens into the building. In the more private areas of the house where the main bedroom
is in the little study area, we wanted to bring the beautiful deep reds of the surrounding tree
trunks. So, we sourced a grey iron bark floor, and then in the main living room where we were
doing our timber veneer joinery, we looked at blackbutt and it's a feature-grade blackbutt the
vertical grain of the timber speaks beautifully next to some windows looking at the tree trunks.
And then with the fittings and fixtures we did try and use a lot of Australian
products. We spoke to a lot of artisans and so for example in the bathrooms we have the
beautiful Lindsey Wherrett ceramic sinks that have got the greens of the surrounding bush,
and we have our beautiful Henry Wilson bronze handles etcetera, and then Archier, a beautiful
Archier fine light in the kitchen so we did try and support where we could local manufacturers
and bring kind of that local product into the house which I do think helps it sort of belong.
One of the strongest parts of the brief was that this was to be quite a minimalist house,
both Mimma and Carl were really quite drawn towards Todao Ando and that Japanese quite
zen aesthetic - what they were wanting was to have a place that was very calming and that
they could actually then enjoy the passing of time enjoy that light from the morning
until the evening. The actual impact of that to have this place where they could come and just
have a different pace and really absorb the beauty and calmness of nature. This dense lush foliage,
towering trees, it was really having a massive impact on their lives and to me that is just
obviously that's just so incredibly rewarding.
I'm Polly Harbison from Polly Harbison Design and this is the Pearl Beach project.