On a dirt road, lined with eucalypts and casuarinas on the NSW Central Coast, sits a simple house wrapped in fireproof materials.
The architect designed home’s location demands the highest level of bushfire control:a Bushfire Attack Level Flame Zone rating. So it’s wrapped in Firefly fireproof fabric and clad entirely in compressed fibre cement, a design answer to both strict council guidelines for fireproofing and the site’s steep terrain.
What started out as a weekender/holiday retreat for a couple with two children morphed into a home that is shared 50/50 with their residence in Sydney.
Just because its robust exterior can withstand Australia’s savage wildfires, doesn’t mean the house isn’t sensitively designed by its architect, Jason Gibney, a director of Jason Gibney Design Workshop.
Rather than the house being at its land’s highest point, the 250 square metre building follows the land’s contours. And the site’s excavation was kept to a minimum, just a couple of metres to anchor it within the sandstone endemic to the area.
The land, densely covered with eucalypts and casuarinas, overlooks Smiths Lake and is a half-hour drive from Foster. “Our brief was to get as close to nature as possible, avoid clearing the site and not to simply put a suburban-style house on the property,” says Gibney.
Rather than a rectilinear floorplan, the design has been skewed. A central pavilion flanked by two other pavilions is connected by glazed links. At the core is an outdoor room, with a shared roof but no walls, which allows the concrete floor to be projected into its bush setting, akin to a viewing platform.
“The idea was that the family felt like they were living in a tree house,” says Gibney, pointing out the lake in the foreground and the mountain ranges beyond.
The timber-framed structure is wrapped entirely in fireproof materials. Walls framing the two courtyards and even doors and shutters have a cement skin. When they’re all closed, the house is like a striking minimalist sculpture – akin to the work of American post-war sculptor Donald Judd.
Conceived as four pavilions finely threaded together, the house features the main bedroom and a guest bedroom at one end and the children’s bedrooms and a secondary living area at the other.
The centre functions as the kitchen, dining and living area. There is a small study nook tucked behind the kitchen and a bathroom/guest powder room is nearby. While this arrangement isn’t particularly unusual, certain moves challenge the usual orthodoxy. The main bedroom, for example, has an outdoor shower in the enclosed courtyard. Even the vanity is located within this courtyard beneath a broad eave.
“Our clients use the guest powder room as their main bathroom, but tend to gravitate to the outdoors during the warmer months of the year,” says Gibney, who included perforated steel screens that disappear into cavity walls to keep out flies and mosquitos but allow light to permeate.
Rather than being a hermitic house disconnected from the bush, the project, known as Among the Eucalypts, draws its owners and visitors outside – to use the outdoors like other rooms.
In contrast to the home’s more robust shell, the interior is tactile and softer, lined completely with birch ply walls. There are expressed pine rafters across the ceilings. Unlike most kitchens, with stone or marble benches, here it’s simply Formply, a material used as a formwork to create concrete walls that can be purchased off the shelf. The floors are also concrete rather than dressed up with tiles or carpet.
Gibney included a series of pathways that lead to built-in benches on platforms that heighten the sense of being within the bush rather than separate from it. “We started with a fairly loose brief that wasn’t prescriptive, which has now led from what was originally a retreat to ever increasingly a place they want to be in more and more,” says Gibney.
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Stephen Crafti is a specialist in contemporary design, including architecture, furniture, fashion and decorative arts.
