Inside Australia’s Most Beautiful Nature Immersed Home (House Tour))

Nothing can quite prepare you for the visceral impact that the house has. The view achieved from here, being sighted true north, it means you have a view of Pittwater and all of the rising sun over the Pacific as well. And then the way the house is designed to encompass all that light coming in from the north, it's a joy to watch and it delivers every time. Everyone who comes here reacts the same way that we did when we first came to the house and that is a visceral reaction to place and view and experience. There was no question that the bones of the house really had significance. The original architect Edward Kingsbury really had nailed how to respond to this site and you could feel it. Really it was a story about potential. There was so much already here that was very tangible but as a designer it was impossible not to see where it could go and that was impossibly exciting. Fiona and Morris came to us with a brief that was highly detailed. They wanted to upgrade a house that was 70 years old but wanted to work very much with the spirit of the place. They bought it because of its fascination with the materials, with the sighting, with the original architect's intent and wanted to work within that, I suppose you'd call it, context of what was here but to bring the building up to modern standards and then to add to it in a manner that creates a sort of a sympathetic layer of architecture to the building. I think it's fair to say that the first vision we had is not what we've ended up with. We were in mortal fear during the process of the renovation that we may do something inadvertently to destroy that magic in this place and I think that it's possible that if Rob and I had kind of done what we originally set out to do we may have lost some of that but the big key was that we learned to listen to the house itself because it was the thing that was speaking and respond and mitigate our desire to impose our will on it and allow it to tell us what we wanted to do. I remember walking up the stairs that come in underneath the house before you actually get to the very top patio and being impressed by how monumental it felt, how much like a castle and so I think it's important and we try and get people when they first come to the house to come up the stairs. We have to find out whether they have a heart problem first. It's a nice way to experience what was really originally designed. Since then we've put in the cable lift because there is only so many times in a day one can do a hundred stairs and we would reach it fairly often. I think one of the challenges was how one deals with the rock shelf that we encountered with the additions to the south which is the study, master bedroom, en suite which sits to the south of the main round room. These were fantastic sort of sandstone boulders that we wanted to preserve. As we started to excavate for the new build we found that the entire rock shelf that came down from Bilgola stopped literally in the powder room and so it just made sense to work with that and build on it. That rock became our sort of launching point for I guess getting really creative. The original architect experimented with a number of different things and probably the most obvious is the roof of the round room where the truss, which is a sort of a combination of timber and a little pyramid of a skylight. This is a pretty experimental and very interesting element which we wanted to replicate not literally but to follow the same sort of experimental sort of thing which we did off the kitchen. There's a guillotine window with counterweights to the kitchen and a big sliding door which opens up to the terrace. So wherever we could we experimented in the same vein as the original architect. I remember distinctly sitting on the stairs that we had just built up to the new kitchen and looking at the original bedroom wing, let's call it, and originally there was no wall and so air and leaves and possums would come in and out at will and so we decided that there had to be something there but we were frightened to ruin the feeling of that openness and so one moment of, and actually I can quite honestly say my idea, was why don't we just make a pivoting wall and Rob went hell yeah and Morris looked sideways and then we just resolved it. It's all very well having ideas but if one can't manifest them then they're useless so finding an artisan who could actually manifest those ideas was one of the catalysts that moved the project forward in ways that we really can't overstate and so John came to us originally as a stonemason and as you can imagine there are acres of stone wall here that we had to point inside and out. He had his own creative abilities and they were awakened and revealed slowly and so the conversation started to be had about how things can be done and he would always put his hand up and say I can do that and we learnt to believe him. He then learnt to do metalwork and create the hand railings that actually sinuously move up throughout the house. You wouldn't be able to achieve those things trying to pull in all the various trades people that you would have and learning to respect each other's point of view I think is the point because a lot of trades reasonably think they know best and getting past that point of view to where they're actually listening to you and treating you as a collaborator was the thing that actually made the project. It's one of those houses that you don't copy it's not something that somebody could say well I want one like that. It's a one-off house in a one-off site beautifully crafted right down to the detail and it's that uniqueness that makes it special really. So much of our heart and soul has been poured into this and it feels like home, feels like pleasure, it feels like wonder, it feels like all of the things that you know seven years and a lot of heart and soul can achieve. It's a magic place and there's no question about it.