Inside the Home of a World Renowned Architect Designed for Himself (House Tour))

You know sometimes I worry about showing clients this house because it's a personal building. We practice, I guess you could call it raw architecture, so architecture that's not finished focused but it's not decorative in any way. We feel that architecture should arrive without decoration and this building is very apparent in that regard. But everyone that we've shown, as long as they're here long enough with some explanation, eventually find something or some things that really make sense and bring their awareness into a different avenue than what they're used to. I did live with my family on the other side, on the Pittwater side, which is a very different place and I was left with a sort of confusion of what do I do with the old family house and I elected to change but the change was going to be somewhere like the south coast and something radical. And I came over here with my son one day and we were surfing Little Avalon just here and I turned around the spot was for sale and I thought that's pretty serious change. We bought the land with what we got for the house. Couldn't afford a house here and it was Fernanda in her wisdom and also ability to see way through that said well rather than renting why don't we just put a tent up and we put up a tent in the backyard and three of us lived here full-time for five years. It was a very nice experience. It enabled us to get more and more familiar with the site and the place as we occupied. It was challenging at times, not too much to do with the rain or the cold, easily manageable. The wind because we as on the top of the headland we get a lot of turbulent air and it gets really big winds here and the tent would flap a lot and would keep us awake at night. But apart from that everything else was very easily manageable. It was a great experience of how to learn to live with very little. It re-informed us about fire, it re-informed us about weather patterns, it allowed us to understand how little you can operate with as Fernanda said. So regularly Fernanda will go around the house and say we don't need this this and this and you know it's almost out the door before I rescue it. Usually on a sentimental basis not on a practical basis but it was a very healthy experience and I must say when we started I didn't think it was going to be. I think the house was the idea was the house to be very unpretentious from the outside for being a very public site and I think as soon as you walk in you don't expect. So it's just a concrete bunker from the outside and it just sits there and then you walk in through this sliding canvas door and then to the sides there's the entry door with a tiny little slit of glass so the person that's coming chopping the dog can see who is outside. Downstairs is mostly the living area, kitchen, living and then there's our spare room or there is a intermediate room which we call it the Indian Head Room which is the double height room where you have the first feel of the house. The intermediate level is more like a community room that it can be intimate if need be but it can also be more open and used in different ways. It's a more versatile floor space and then one level up is one bedroom which is a more secluded bedroom and then you keep going up again it's just the roof terrace which reveals itself by opening a hatch like a sort of a boat. It takes you back to your origins really you know if you go camping or whatever you sit around the fire you know there's an amazing silence that comes upon you if you're willing to own it. Fire is sort of that connection back to tribal thinking or tribal behaviour which is elemental in our lives and which we tend to be losing. In this particular fire you'll notice there's no chimney but there is big sliding panels the roof opens so we open the roof and you open these doors here a little bit and you get the right ventilation to sustain the fire burning properly but also we can open our room onto the fire, we can open the living room onto the fire, we can open the terrace onto the fire so the fire is actually servicing most of the house visually and emotionally and spiritually. It's a very important element and the rawness of this courtyard is also important if this was a tailored you know manufactured courtyard it wouldn't have nearly the impact emotional spiritual impact as this courtyard is in this informal sense. We did like 450 drawings of this building you know did you notice that the stairs wobble when you come down? Did you notice that every panel is the same as the ceiling panels? Did you notice there's drop panels in the ceiling and the drop panels reflect how a cave would weather from the opening? The shadows of the trees on the canvas there were all sorts of components to this building which were beyond the process of building it was much more storytelling. It's like reading a good book you read it and you get the gist of the book you know you're not going to get everything hopefully when you come here you get the gist you know and people will pick up on different things you know depending on whether someone's talking to them or whether they're looking and trying to find and there are the lookers and finders you know and there are the people who generalize as well so there are a lot of things that'll be missed but that's also a good house that you know you come back and you find new things and you come back and you find more things and you come back and you go wow this is endless you know and it should be endless because it had endless thinking that went into it you know 450 detailed drawings there's a lot of drawings so there's at least 450 things here to find it's a bit like those little drawings you know where they say find the mistake or something you know and there's seven he's got 450.