Is This the Most Beautiful Modern Farmhouse in Australia?

It's important distinction to make between a country house and a farmhouse. A country house is often located in a picturesque location. It's also a place to experience the country and then to travel out onto the land from there. A farmhouse on the other hand is part of the active operations of the farm. It's the working place for the farmer and it's more concerned with the utility of the farm. So at the beginning we said this very much is a farmhouse. This is a house that needs to relate to those working areas of the farm and it needs to sort of sit as part of it and apart from it. So we're located in Shady Creek about 15-20 minutes outside of Warragul. We're surrounded by farms and gently rolling hills and it's very verdant and green because it has a relatively high rainfall in this area. So upon visiting the site for the first time there was a house, the original farmhouse, in the same location. Like a little little camellia gardens around the perimeter of it. But what was really interesting about this particular site was this kind of large service yard, like an extended courtyard if you like, surrounded by this congregational grouping of these light grey corrugated sheds. We were interested in how the house might begin a conversation with those sheds and perhaps appear as part of them. So the overall plan for the property is a group of corrugated sheds and the house around a large service yard and then the plan for the house is smaller corrugated sheds arranged around a courtyard garden. There was a central idea that the house would in some way relate to the sheds, especially in its material and their roof forms. But then there was a number of decisions to be made about the various pitches and forms and coming together and it's a really difficult balance to get right. You don't want it to be too chaotic or too random in a way but then we also didn't want it to be overly simplistic. The old sheds were actually what our client was most attached to on the property. We just borrowed directly from that light grey corrugated material and imagined a house with walls and roof of that same material but thinking about the detailing in such a way that it was not a more typical residential type of adaption. How does that translate into a residence and a house with a higher degree of consideration and detail? We started to think about the corrugation as being like a veil or a skin that you would cut openings through and then recess the windows back from it. Deep reveals and shadow and very crisp lines around the openings. But where we had the house meeting the courtyard and the living areas we were conscious of upgrading those materials and using some timber cladding and adding a bit more warmth. An important consideration for any home that we design is that arrival sequence. For the visitor to this house they land in a big farming service courtyard. There's a large sliding gate. The owner opens that gate. It allows the visitor to come into quite a verdant courtyard and a garden space and straight into the living areas. A central idea for the plan, if you'll excuse the pun, is this idea of a pinwheel plan. The scabbled concrete column becomes the anchoring of the plan and around there is arranged the kitchen, living, dining and a garden space. What we're really keen in investigating for this house is how do we challenge the traditional kitchen, living, dining on one side and garden on the other. So the garden, the kitchen, the living, the dining becoming equally weighted as four quadrants. And then by creating these large sliding doors that pocket into that concrete column, when the weather permits you can open them up and you can walk around that column and radiate to all those areas. From there we have separate wings. So on one side we've got the garage and the mudroom for the arrival of the owner. There's the main bedroom and the bathroom and walk-in robe and another wing with a couple of guest bedrooms. We were very interested in this idea of what it's like to live and work on the land. I often like to say that farmers, the original work-from-home profession, during the day they're very much in and out of the house, gumboots off and on and taking coats off and on. But then at the end of the day you want to be able to sort of remove yourself from the farm. We needed to be careful if we were strongly referencing the sheds around the services yard that the interior of the house did not become an inhabited shed. So it's quite a different palette and feel to the interior of the house. There needed to be a robust quality to most of the house. There's some areas that warmed up through the use of timber. The other element that we worked very hard with is concrete. So there's actually three different types of concrete that are incorporated into the house, such as the poured-in-place concrete slab and wall to the back of the fireplace and then the timber of the wall in the kitchen and dining and then the ceiling over the living create warmth and texture for the house as well. In our projects we love the opportunity and getting involved with the final pieces that really make the design. In this case there was custom rugs that were commissioned for the dining and living areas. We worked very closely with Jenny Jones rugs both on what the design of the rug was and the wool and silk that were used in their fabrication. One rug there's a pattern that kind of related to the fields, the way that the land is kind of carved up in a farmland setting. On the other rug there was this lovely swirling pattern to the rug and then we could use these blues, the wool and silk which allowed for different sort of reflective qualities of that carpet through the day and that helps create the living space within a larger volume. There's this interesting idea that the garden was almost like a Japanese garden, quite carefully considered and placed. But what we tried to do was twist on that Japanese garden idea by using Australian species. So we worked very closely with the landscape architects and they were able to provide this kind of very sculptural forms and trees that were very sort of nice to look out onto and a good garden cover. There's so many layers that go into the thinking and design and selection process of a house. There's a million decisions that go together from the sighting to the plan to materials to detailing. But at the end of the day the narrative and the materials get lost in just the atmosphere of the house and what it feels like to be in the spaces. And the feeling that this house manages to evoke is this very comfortable sanctuary.