A Small Cabin Built Between the Trees

When you buy a really large property you automatically assume that you can kind of do whatever you want with it, but in reality that's not the case. It's quite a big site, the actual area you can build on is quite small. There are rules in place that protect vegetation, protect wildlife. You can build but you've got to do it in a very precise way. Where we are is on the Gold Coast, a very coastal beachy city. You go 15 minutes west from the beach and you start to get into this beautiful hinterland. We've got these ridgelines that run towards the coast like fingers and then as you get up onto the ridgelines it becomes more eucalypt woodlands, obviously lots of wildlife. We've got a lot of really important ecological habitat over the site, namely koala habitat. The overlays meant that we couldn't actually remove any vegetations. There is a little clearing on the side of the hill but there is no allowance to remove any mature vegetation. So that essentially set the framework for the specific part of the site that we built on. We drew a diagram of the cleared footprint that was clear of canopy and we set ourselves a goal of working within that really odd shaped footprint to produce a functional building. Effectively the floor plan shape is drawn from working with the canopies. We haven't put these angles on the site for an arbitrary reason because we want a cool shape. We've done it because it's responding to something, it's responding to a setback, part of a tree canopy. The cabin is located in a pocket of the site that has a requirement for a flame zone bushfire rating which is the highest standard of bushfire rating that can be applied to a dwelling. Your options are really limited once you get to that level of fire rating. We itemised a list of elements and materials that we could use across the project. It was some performance but also some aesthetic requirements for the project. We worked out that we couldn't use timber cladding because of it not having a strong enough bushfire resistance. So we found this wonderful product, Bubik, that ticked all the boxes in terms of its bushfire resistance. It's made from 60% recycled content which helps make the case for it as a beautiful and sustainable. There's one access point to the site which is a gentle gradient gravel driveway that brings you down to essentially a landing. We put utility downstairs so there's undercroft, there's laundry and there's storage and you enter the house via a gentle ramp. As you walk up that ramp you get glimpses of the bushland and the view and then you make your way to the front door. And what we tried to do then with the living arrangement was keep it as simple as possible but make sure there was enough space for Kevin to live comfortably but not too much space that maybe wasn't needed for a house of this scale. And we effectively pushed the living and public spaces out as far as we could out to the edge of the plan so that you get the most of the lovely southeastern view. We wanted to, I suppose, give him a lovely generous deck area to accommodate his pool table and there's almost an even split between inside and outside in the living areas because the Queensland climate supports that. We used essentially the leftover space for the other brief requirements which was the bedrooms, the bathroom and a little bit storage. The limited expanse of site that we could work on really meant that our planning needed to be really tight. As we fleshed out our ideas initially and looked at our diagrams and let the site reveal to us where it needed to sit and what it needed to do, in a sense the site did the heavy lifting in terms of design work. The site pushed us in a direction and I think what that meant was that we could then, instead of focusing on square metres and size, we could really make a slightly higher quality, a bit more thoughtful. We could put glazing where it needed it to be and we could set up the house properly taking advantage of views and breezes. And the thing that was most enjoyable about the outcome is that you are literally in the canopy, you're touching the trees and I think there's something really special about that that you might not necessarily get from trying to pack in a lot of program. This house is safe, it's secure, it's comfortable but it's not excessive. We picked a few honest materials. There's not a whole lot going on in terms of the palette there but that was a decisive move. It's about keeping this house simple. From the onset the external cladding was always going to be something dark. When you look into bushland there are three or four main colours that you see. You see some greens and yellows, you see some browns but you also see black in the shadows of any bushland. That's what in effect trying to do is really blend the project into the landscape and somewhat hide it in there. What I love about Ubix in X-Express is that it allowed us to stain it rather than just paint it. When you paint something it's a really flat and even finish. When you stain a material you get unexpected characteristics shine through which we really love but then an unexpected result of staining and the sheen level that we gave it is that what it does, especially when a little bit of dappled light hits the cladding is that it reflects the greenery of the canopy around it. We wanted the palette to be quiet and we wanted the house to be able to really acknowledge its surrounds and so the tones are natural and earthy and in some way even though this house is visible we want it to be invisible. We want the eucalypt leaves to be the thing you look at not the golden taps. I think that you can sometimes be really romantic about how you site a project in the landscape but once you start to understand the really harsh realities bushfire, of flood, of natural disaster you start to come to terms with the reality of where we're designing and what we're designing in. You've got to be really cognizant of what's around you and what is a risk whether it be wildlife or natural disaster and design to suit that.