Witta is a house that's located in Noosa Heads which is on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland,
very much in the subtropics. With incredible views and aspect to the water to the South,
the challenge was trying to design a house that would then open up to the North-East to
capture this beautiful winter sun while engaging with the water to the South.
We've really tried to heighten the experience of living and being here every day through
these quite deliberate experiences of skylight, window and courtyard.
And there's just a sense upon arrival that this is absolutely an adorned, unfettered invisible
connection between occupation of this land and the beautiful environment in the world outside.
There's a lovely sense of open plan space dedicated to living where you move inside and
outside through these seamless thresholds so that one occupies all of these areas as a pavilion.
And the outdoor space then has the ability to also
close down with a series of screens which offers privacy to the canal on the south.
That space in turn opens up to the North over the swimming pool with a lovely sense of garden.
On the upper floor that area is dedicated to the bedrooms;
a series of kids bedrooms are all ensuited, a number of them facing up to the North.
And then the parents in the guest bedroom are both on the Southern side with views over the water.
And that also then creates the zone separation
that's articulated by the void in the middle of the space.
The creation of these voids and courtyard space is
really an ability to bring light deep into the plan.
And we've been able to capture an amazing sense of natural light through use of skylights that talk
more about almost open sky above you rather than just additional supplementary light.
The basement which is a very unexpected space in that it is all lit through glass
panels inside of the swimming pool so all the natural light there is through the water.
What we've tried to do is look at materials that are natural that talk to this natural environment.
The charred timber while not direct references to any one specific thing
in Noosa do talk about the texture of timber and even the idea of forest fires
and natural forces that happen within the environment.
There's nothing that compares with concrete in terms of the
versatility of it, it can take on the form of anything we can really conceive of,
so when you factor in kind of what we need the building to physically do and
how we want to go about doing it there's just nothing in our opinion that competes.
One of the things that we have been developing in our architecture for some time now is how
we deal with the facades of buildings, we sort of tried to move away from a series of windows
just punctuating a wall into the facade being seen as a homologous item in itself.
What that means here is that we've got a double facade where all the windows and the ventilation
and light and all those sorts of things are dealt with in one layer and then there's the screen in
front of it that deals with not only the sun but it deals with privacy and then also creates the
architectural dialogue that is very much the experience of this building from the street.
It takes about fifty percent of the heat load off the facade
and equally important kind of tempers the space in such a way that you enjoy the spaces
as a sense of light that would come through, you know, branches of a tree.
That planting is very much a central theme in the house because it's part of softening
this otherwise very hard concrete, but as it sits more into the landscape and ages
and the plants start to cascade more and more people understand that this building is more
about the landscape ultimately than it is trying to be just about the architecture.
This project was very much a team effort and Jen Negline, the associates who ran this project,
did an incredible job of the documentation along with Neva and Lucy to realise all of those ideas.
The execution on site from Jason Warren and his team is just absolutely sublime. And Hong
and Mark who did the interiors and the landscaping in turn then just built on
that and added necessary layers to really finish off this house and it created all the softness.
To pay due credit to Craig and Ali our clients,
to say that they were extraordinarily trusting and giving I think would be an understatement.
I think ultimately great architecture is about balance, it's about sort of finding the ability
for a person to sit in a couch but a group to sit out in a room. What it is about is creating
a place for this family to be able to enjoy the best of being in this environment and ultimately
architecture, landscape, interior, decor, art - they're just tools to facilitate that.
Great architecture maybe does its best to try and curate all of those things
to offer that experience in a way that is memorable and you know wonderful.