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When the owner of this Mount Martha abode decided to swap her farm in North-East Victoria for a home closer to her son and his family, she was determined not to lose the nostalgic appeal of farm life.
She found the perfect site — a property on the Monrington Peninsula next to her son’s home, separated by a winding backyard creek. The home, however, was less ideal: rundown and disappearing into overgrown land.
‘The condition of the original house combined with the overgrown nature of the site and difficult access meant there was a certain degree of faith that needed to be taken when our client considered making a new all-on-one-level long-term home for herself,’ says MRTN Architects director Antony Martin.
As a stepped floor plan is the typical response to building on a steep site, this presented the biggest challenge. With a brief for a single-level home, Antony carefully reworked the site’s contours, embedding the house into the landscape without relying on imposing retaining walls or lifting the home above the garden plane.
The owner’s connection to country living and her previous home — an owner-built house designed by John Prizzy using rough-sawn logs and bricks made from clay found on the property — heavily inspired the design.
‘She didn’t necessarily want it to be as rustic as the original,’ says Antony. ‘But still have much of the essence of that family home.’
Inside, locally sourced rammed earth, spotted gum timber, and burnished concrete form the nostalgic material palette.
‘The timber ply and lining boards create that refined connection back to the original roughly finished family homestead, while the concrete floors are a pragmatic back-to-basics approach to durable flooring but with the patina and character that comes with a burnished finish,’ Antony explains.
Drawing inspiration from abandoned homesteads, where Antony noted an old brick fireplace is often all that remains, he devised a chimney-like room in the centre of the house clad in rammed earth.
‘We did not have an extensive budget for rammed earth walls, so had to be circumspect about where they were to be incorporated into the design,’ he explains. ‘Instead of long walls extending the length of the home as you typically see employed, we proposed a rammed earth wall room at the centre of the plan and more specifically at the entry.’
Beyond its familiar reference, the rammed earth also improves the new home’s environmental performance by maintaining a stable temperature year-round without a heating and cooling system.
‘Our favourite part of the house is the overall sense of materiality you get when you walk into the entry through the living spaces and then to the garden,’ Antony says.
This connection to the garden was another key consideration in the design.
‘Our client is a serious gardener, so the provision of both something to look out onto as well as a productive garden was paramount to her,’ he explains.
Generous windows in the open-plan kitchen, living, and dining space overdeliver on this element of the brief, with towering pines and the owner’s vegetable patch delivering breathtaking scenes.
Antony says, ‘We are very proud of the contribution we have made to this next chapter of our client’s life and the way we were able to create something new while also speaking to the nostalgia she has for her home in the country.’
