An Architect’s Own Seaside Dream Home (House Tour)

Ocean House is a beach house. It's where you go to experience a completely different way of life to what you're used to in the city. You want to escape. You want to feel different. You want to experience the wind when you walk the beach, the rain, the sun, the elements. And then when you return home, you want to be concurred from all of that. So Ocean House, like most buildings, but I think particularly down the coast, has a responsibility to create different experiences for you. I'm Rob Mills. I'm an architect and I designed Ocean House many years ago for my family and my friends. We're situated in North Lawn, quite a famous seaside village on the west coast of Victoria. I searched for a special block of land to build our home on. For quite a few years, it had a 30 degree slope on it. And when I looked at that, I felt being an architect, I had the skills to unlock the topography and make quite a special building on the land because of the topography. It was essential that we captured the view of the water, the ocean crashing on the rocks below and the beach below us. And that meant we had to raise the living room level to about 14 metres above natural ground level, which is an extraordinary height in Victoria. We had to build the house and the treetops. So we created this environment virtually in thin air. From that, the number of levels were created. Whenever I build for myself, my objective is to look out into the world and see nature. I want to be immersed in the wilderness actually, it's my preferred. And this land borders the National Park. So the view extraordinarily of the forest to me is just as exciting and important as the view of the ocean beyond. Like all of the houses that we design, we're trying to create different experiences within the house. So there are subterranean rooms and ocean house, which are cave-like. And there are bedrooms with quite small windows compared with the pavilion style of the living rooms. When you're within the bedroom, you really do feel separate from the world. You're cocooned, you're protected, you're in your own space and the world's very much a distance away from you. The kitchen, living and dining is the heart of any great residence. And that's the case with ocean house. During the day when the pavilion is bathed with sunlight, they all work together as one because they're all made of the same materials, concrete, timber and glass. We tend to choose materials and fabrics and paint colours and timber colours that are as close to the natural state of the material as possible. If they've been influenced, they're influenced with natural ochres and things like that. The timber, which we put a whitewash into to reflect the trunks of the trees in the forest behind and the glass, which in summer when sun shining reflects the blue of the ocean and when it's a cloudy day, it turns grey. So again, it reflects the environment as it is in that moment. The environment we created is calm, it's soothing and that's because your eye just quietly travels from one material to the next, found in the furniture, the architecture and the interiors respectfully and harmoniously. The overriding aim I think is to create something that's truly casual to live in, that lacks any pretension. So when you lay about and recover from your busy life in the city, the environment you're sitting within is also casual. When we set out to build this house, all I had in mind was a place for my family to gather and play together and enjoy life.