Inside a Tropical Garden Home That Connects You to Nature (House Tour)

This project is in sunny Tasmania on the backside of Hobart. It's a spectacular site that has a lot of depth and character and it has a view down to the water. The site is extremely steep and was a major driver of a lot of the design decisions. It's also very heavily vegetated with native forest and as a result there's lots of wildlife and birdlife that move through the site. But it's also dark and moody and the clients have really lent in and embraced that. It becomes quite an experiential building to be in. The brief for this house was to be a dwelling but also to be an art studio. We really wanted to embrace the fact that there was an incredibly steep site and figure out ways to work with it. So as such the buildings laid along the contours of the site and then the major volume stacks between those. So the approach to the house is actually between the volumes and you actually have to come quite far into the village of buildings in order to enter the home. Come down the walkway through the native bush to the front door which is under cover that sits under the major volume. When you enter that door we have this beautiful little space to dwell and take off your shoes and it's a coat room and take in the amazing kind of aspect that the building faces. On that level we have a really cute little snug and the client has chosen great art, great books and also some really warm furniture to sit in there. And it's somewhere to really like get warm and snug and have that kind of view of the landscape through somewhere that's quite warm and intimate. We have a really fantastic bath room that has a bath that sits right in the tree canopy and that's the Japanese style bath so you can fill it up quite high get your shoulders down look out into the vegetation. You move into the main bedroom through a robe base. This room is pretty exciting, has glass on all three sides. You can sit in there and be cozy even though you're in this the extreme landscape. When you arrive at the top of the stairs you're treated to a garden which is actually the rooftop of the volume that you just walked up from and that garden is planted out with a lot of native creepers and low-lying plants. From there you turn into the dining room which we're sitting in right now. Got glass either side, feels formal but also fun. That space then rolls into the kitchen and then we have a little coffee area that looks back through another timber screen into the dining space. With a kind of hero view we have the sitting room. It's a big experience and one that's like standing in a cubby house as a child and then over in the other volume client has an art studio and also a spare bedroom another bathroom. Very much curated to how she works and how she wants to produce work. The client actually chose all of the colours on the site picking up on native vegetation from around the landscape and bringing that into the house and Dulux really unlocked her potential and opportunities through that process. The master bedroom uses Dulux jungle cloak. It's quite a calm green tone and really reflects some of the vegetation you can see from that space. The rumpus room on the other hand uses Dulux battle dress. Here's a kind of warm but a slightly darker green and is on the kind of south side of the building where the tones are a bit darker and a bit moodier. In the guest room which is in a separate pavilion we have Dulux classic calm. That whole space has a unique feel like even in the bathrooms and the bedroom and really adds another kind of layer for that guest experience. For the studio given that the client is producing works of art in there we've used Dulux stow white and that's a really clean white palette but it still has some depth to it. My Dulux study tour was an amazing experience. It is enlightening and that's what we're all after. It's a transmission of information about the kind of current architectural discourse and the people that operate and produce a lot of the work in that kind of conversation. The biggest thing that I took away from it is the connection to the people that I went on the tour with. The other winners of the competition but also the Dulux staff. They have been extremely valuable mentors to me over the years. The tour is really a seed where you kind of grow from. The thing that I'm most proud about with this project is the collaboration between us and the clients. Really empowering them and giving them space to create a home out of the building that we delivered has really added that last critical 10% to the project which makes it feel like a special home rather than just a piece of design. So my favourite part of the home is the window system. I love standing in that lounge room as the trees kind of wave back and forth especially as the sun either comes up or sets. Being in there and watching the light through the trees as they move it just takes me back to being a child standing in my cubby house with a rickety floor. Brings you into your body and makes you experience the place that you're in like nothing else.