This Coastal House Will Make You Rethink Beach Homes Forever (House Tour)

The aesthetic of the home was to be a beach house but a beach house with a difference. I guess the typical beach house would ask for really light and bright finishes whereas Port Phillip Bay is actually a much darker and moodier coastal location than is typical and so we wanted to sort of create a monolithic moody stone structure. Often typically a beach brief would say let's do a sandstone or a light stone. We actually felt in this location that a grey stone such as the Andorra was a perfect fit. My name is Damon Hills. I'm the Principal of Architecture at Finnish Architecture Interiors in Albert Park and I was the architect on this project. Cliff House is located on the cliffs in Portsea along the Millionaire's Walk and is in Bunurong country. On this site was an existing dilapidated house that needed to be either renovated or replaced to be suitable for our client. So when the client came to us for this house the vision was for a holiday home for him and his partner. Part of the brief here was that it was open to us. It was really what was the right solution for this location and you know much to our joy we were given an open brief. This site is interesting you actually go from a low point up to a high point on the cliff and then the cliff rolls beyond the house down to Port Phillip Bay. The levels had to be thought about a for planning for maximum height levels on those sort of undulating landscape and also to maximise the views towards the bay. Typically you like to have your views on the upper level and often homes in this area have reverse living. In this case the ground floor has a magnificent view nestled amongst landscape with the bay in the background and and the pier so it actually it was a better outcome to have a living on the ground floor. So as you come up there is a ramp that goes down into a four-car garage and on that level is a wine cellar, laundry and entry foyer and the staircase starts from that level on the lower level. As you come up to the ground floor we have a study kitchen, living, dining, sauna and a plunge pool and access to the main lap pool and if we go up to the next level it's three bedrooms. For this project we collaborated with Lisa Ellis Gardens for the landscape and Dean Wilson Constructions for the build. The home is a monolithic stone structure and so we worked closely with Eco Outdoors in the stone selections. So we used Andorra stone for the entire facade. We then took that stone onto the paving and it into the interior as well and in order to warm that up we included timber veneers through the home. In addition to that we use polished plaster because it actually brings the light in from outside it creates a reflection and actually picks up the colors of the day and brings it into the house. Eco Outdoors normally sells the tiles in a standard format but we worked on customisation for this home because we needed it to be used on expanse and in for many different areas. So we had larger format floor tiles, we had a variety of sizes for the walls externally and we had battens for curves etc around the landscape. We used natural limestone through the home and we wanted to have that same look through the pool. The natural limestone can't be used with the pool so we use the arrow mill technofirma to complement the stone. One of the proudest moments in the house is the monolithic carved handrail on the staircase which runs from the basement to the first floor carved out of blocks of Andorra limestone which took incredible craftsmanship from the stonemasons. Once this house was finished we were very proud of the house it was really well constructed by Dean Wilson and all the details and finishes have worked perfectly. Everything works, the spaces work, the client is happy to the degree that they pretty much live here full-time yeah.