look i think the house does challenge
our standard convention of the rural
australian house the traditional homes
from 200 years ago are more about an
imported architecture from england and
from europe
and really imposed upon the landscape
our project here taps into a kind of
more recent understanding and
appreciation of the australian landscape
it is harsh
but there's a really nice quality in
that harshness
the project came about through a
relationship with a former client of
ours who's
from the country
and his experience is it really is
difficult to build something substantial
in remote parts of rural australia so he
came up with this idea of
creating a prefabricated home
that would work in different landscape
settings around australia
so so our primary ambition with the
project was to subvert this idea that it
would be a pokey constrained
pre-fabricated home
and the way we did this was to place
modules side by side offset them and
then link them all together around a
courtyard so that when you're in any one
part of the house
you get the secondary views through the
house and then off into the landscape
so there's a sense of space within the
house that goes beyond what you might
expect from this pre-fabricated module
[Music]
so many of the benefits of of prefab are
the fact that we're building out of
controlled environments so can can
manage our waste in turn we can speed up
the construction program but for us
being able to work
in an environment where you don't have
you know wind rain
sunshine
so the house is
essentially built under a roof and
protect it until it lands on the side so
when it lands on the site it is like
brand new
every time i sort of arrive to take
someone through the house
they're really taken back by the fact
that it's a prefab home
if you hadn't built it it's really hard
to depict where those joints are
[Music]
so the materiality of the house is
dictated by weight given that the house
had to be transported on the back of a
truck we're pretty instantly drawn to
the idea of using an australian hardwood
for the primary cladding
and we've finished it with a
natural stain that allows the timber to
silver off and it works beautifully to
tie in with the gums of this particular
site but it ages and gets that really
nice character of aged timber so the
project has been about architecturally
being much more quiet in the landscape
and allowing that australian landscape
really to come up to the edge of the
home
and to actually be drawn into the house
and for the occupation of the house the
experience of being in the home to be
coloured by the landscape
the first time i noticed what a spot it
was was
when we're on site and sort of doing the
set out to to prepare for the the
arrival of the house
there's no sound other than the the
trees blowing
birds chirping and waves crashing so you
really do feel removed
[Music]
it's really been a special moment to see
the house
really sitting quietly in the landscape
which was always an intent but at the
same time having a certain power about
the way it was working with the
landscape
[Music]
you