The primary design intentions are a poetic relationship with the landscape, an immersive experience of the site and a complex, ever-changing architectural environment that speaks not only to domesticity, but to the mysteries of being in the world. The feeling of endlessness but also containment, human interest but also dissolution into the natural, are some of the oppositions that drove the design response.?

The house form was visualized through a series of abstract drawings of landscape as an array of masses similar to the surrounding hills, piling up in the middle and stepping down on the edges. The edges are irregular and dissipate into the landscape by including voids within them and forming courtyards. Unlike the vernacular-inspired architecture that pervades the region, the house is intended to make specific reference to a perceived character of landscape. The house platform was dug substantially into the slope to avoid presenting a disruptive silhouette, improve wind protection and give it a sense of rootedness in a vast landscape. The excess soil was used to enhance privacy by creating berms at the bottom of the site.

The house is formed out of a single abstract gesture: stacked overlapping cubes with multiple architectural functions. They are arranged to create wind protected courtyards of different qualities, form a variety of volumes?and to create strange and unexpected architectural juxtapositions and effects. The complex architecture generated by the simplest of gestures, is the hallmark of this project. The approach and entry axes always terminate in landscape, extending the house infinitely into its surroundings. Ambiguity between inside and outside is achieved through continuity between exterior and interior elements and finishes and extensive transparency.

A precisely minimalist but natural materiality was achieved through the use of a special sized flush jointed paving brick from a nearby brickyard and off-shutter concrete, both painted. Much attention was given to create an environment of changing light and shadow conditions with different luminosities of surface and unexpected light effects at?different times of the day and year. Overhead beams are used to gather and bounce light into the building indirectly and strategically placed skylights flood light in directly from above washing the textured walls with light. In a sense the real material we worked with was light and how it plays and dances through the building constantly in a variety of ways that can only be experienced. The simplicity of the house is expressed in clean forms and lines, a limited palette of grey tiles, timber and white painted walls and soffits.