Devising a modernist super house requires a deep understanding of the interplay between architecture, interior design and the natural garden and landscape. Championing a heightened sense of experience, Witta Circle engages with the internal and external spaces – privacy screens, purposeful zoning and considered materiality articulates a levelled layering, accentuated throughout the house tour. Located in Noosa Heads on the Sunshine Coast, Witta Circle is a home that endeavours to claim the coveted title of modernist super house. Shaun Lockyer Architects has executed a robust yet warm home, with a strong sense of space, place and immersion.
By challenging traditional notions of how architecture converses with interior design and externally with landscape, Witta Circle embraces open planned living, dedicated to public gathering spaces. Moving through seamless thresholds, the home occupies both inside and outside areas. Showcased throughout the house tour is the swimming pool, garden and wine cellar. Through deliberate use and placement of skylights, windows and courtyards, light is filtered throughout the interior design. This includes the creative solution to bringing light down into the basement, where natural light is filtered through water and glass panels within the outdoor pool of the modernist super house.
Upon arrival, there is a strong connection between the built and natural environments. The façade of the super house is a literal layer atop the architectural dialogue of the home. The house tour identifies the external screen as another consideration for privacy, sun protection and experience. It also takes approximately 50% of the heat off the façade, creating an exchange between the natural environment and the architecture, which tempers the internal experience of the modernist super house.
The materiality of the house is an ode to the natural landscape. The charred timber references texture and natural forces, whilst the concrete speaks to a bolder interpretation of form. The plants soften the harder aspects of the built structure, with green cascading over the walls and submerging the home within the environment.
Wita is a house that's located in Noosa Heads, which is on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland,
very much in the subtropics. With incredible views and aspect of the water to the south,
the challenge was trying to design a house that would then open up to the northeast to
capture all this beautiful winter sun while engaging with the water to the south.
We've really tried to heighten the experience of living and being here every day through these
quite deliberate experiences of skylight, window and courtyard. And there's just a sense upon
arrival that there's this absolutely unadorned, unfettered, invisible connection between
occupation of this land and the beautiful environment in the world outside.
There's a lovely sense of open planned space dedicated to living, where you move inside and
outside through these seamless thresholds, so that one occupies all of these areas as a pavilion.
And the outdoor space then has the ability to also close down to a series of screens which
offers privacy to the canal on the south. That space in turn opens out to the north over the
swimming pool, the lovely sense of garden. On the upper floor, that area is dedicated to
bedrooms, a series of kids' bedrooms that are all ensuited, a number of them facing out to the north.
And then the parents and the guest bedroom are both on the southern side with views over the water.
And that also then creates the zone separation that's articulated by the void in the middle of
the space. But the creation of these voids and courtyard space is really an ability to bring
light deep into the plan. And we've been able to capture an amazing sense of natural light through
use of skylights that talk more about almost open sky above you rather than just additional
supplementary light. The basement, which is a very unexpected space in that it is all lit
through glass panels inside of the swimming pool, so all the natural light there is through the
water. What we've tried to do is look at materials that are natural, that talk to this natural
environment. The charred timber, while not direct references to any one specific thing in Noosa,
do talk about the texture of timber and even the idea of forest fires and natural forces that
happen within the environment. There's nothing that compares with concrete in terms of the
versatility of it. It can take on the form of anything we can really conceive of. So when you
factor in kind of what we need the building to physically do and how we want to go about doing
it, there's just nothing in our opinion that competes. One of the things that we have been
developing in our architecture for some time now is how we deal with the facades of buildings. We
sort of try to move away from a series of windows just punctuating a wall into the facade being seen
as a homologous item in itself. What that means here is that we've got a double facade with all
the windows and the ventilation and light and all those sorts of things are dealt with in one layer
and then there's the screen in front of it that deals with not only the sun but it deals with
privacy and then also creates the architectural dialogue that is very much the experience of this
building from the street. It takes about 50 percent of the heat load off the facade and
equally important kind of tempers the space in such a way that you enjoy the spaces as a sense
of light that would come through you know branches of a tree. That planting is very much a central
theme in the house because it's part of softening this otherwise very hard concrete but as it sits
more into the landscape and ages and the plants start to cascade more and more people understand
that this building is more about the landscape ultimately than it is trying to be just about the
architecture. This project was very much a team effort and Jen Eggline the associate who ran this
project did an incredible job of the documentation along with Neva and Lucy to realise all of those
ideas. The execution on site from Jason Warren and his team is just absolutely sublime and Hong
and Mark who did the interiors and the landscaping in turn that they just built on that and added
necessary layers to really finish off this house and it created all the softness. To pay due credit
to Craig and Ali our clients to say that they were extraordinarily trusting and giving I think
would be an understatement. I think ultimately great architecture is about balance. It's about
sort of finding the ability for a person to sit on a couch but a group to sit out in a room.
What it is about is creating a place for this family to be able to enjoy the best of being in
this environment and ultimately architecture, landscape, interior, decor, art they're just tools
to facilitate that. Great architecture maybe does its best to try and curate all of those
things to offer that experience in a way that is memorable and you know wonderful.
