Home is a Journey Ep 2 - Cove

It's pretty panoramic, you know, it's pretty hard to find a view and to be that close to the water. We were wanting something that was resort style looking and while we knew the spaces we wanted, Steve really made the dream of what we were looking for. We've been in Minham Cove for 15, 16 years now, so this was the third house that we built. This was the block that we ultimately always wanted to live in. We really wanted to have a lot of opportunity to enjoy the different spaces around the house, so not just be centred always outside or in the alfresco, but to have different zones where we could watch tv in different places, get separate areas for the family. You know, we really wanted a house that we weren't going to grow out of. We always feel like we're on holidays here, so that was really part of our total dream. We've had, you know, graduation parties here, we've had 50th birthday parties here, we've had 18th parties here and it's just a home that's just so easily fits two or three hundred people at any particular point in time. From the day we met Steve, he came out to the block, we just bought it and we came out, we asked him to look at it, what did he think and just straight away there was an immediate connection with him, both Rod and I felt that and we just knew he was the right fit for us and I think Steve surrounds himself with quality people like himself, which makes the process and the journey so easy. We sort of really had mapped out a layout in our minds, given we built here a few times, so we knew we wanted living spaces, kitchens, all this at the front pool internally, our bedroom at the front of the home as well with the views. So we sort of knew the layout of the, particularly the weather, living on the water, so for us it was really integral that the pool was internally placed in the property. When we built here once, we had the pool in the front yard and never swam in it because we were all so cold, so yeah, so the pool being internalised in the internal USHAP courtyard was paramount. Each room had to flow into the next room, had to make sense and had to lead into the different environments that we're going to present over a lifetime of living in a house and the house lens in the wintertime, maybe being an internal and being in the centre courtyard, summertime, the house lens stepping out on the river, that was always in the conversation with Steve that we wanted to be able to see through the house all the time, we always wanted to see the river, we always wanted to enjoy the different parts of the house and we always just kept saying listen, we're really social and we want to make sure that this house is a lot of fun. We knew the block, we knew the winds, we knew how this house needed to be and Steve came back, worked with us like on the block, was here, spent time, he told us when it was windy and took on board what we said and you know that got us to where we are now with everything is oversized, everything's big, we think that less is more here on this block and we shouldn't be confusing the view with any obstructions or anything else. 10-15 years ago that whole modern, real modern look sort of really started to evolve and Steve was really on the edge of that and we had seen a few houses he'd built and really that was why we decided we wanted to go a totally different style of home we wanted to build and I think it's going to stand the test of time.