Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House Breezeway House
Project Description

At Breezeway House, refuge and prospect are found in a garden between the Pine and the Figs. It offers a joyous and engaging destination for holidays beside the beach, where shelter, shade and connection to landscape are prioritised. On a complicated, subdivided block with cross easements and significant fall, the building form is stretched along the southern boundary allowing a series of gardens to buffer neighbouring buildings and easements.
The breezeway acts to thermally regulate the house and provides access to flexible bedroom spaces that open directly to garden spaces. Upstairs, living spaces open to elevated decks and terraces set amongst tree canopies and lookouts to the beach. The rhythmic linear building form twists towards the view to echo Tudibaring Headland. Materials are robust and sustainable, and the hand of the maker is obvious in the craft of the structure and the detail throughout the building.


NSW AIA Jury Citation: Award for Residential Architecture - (Houses) New

This family holiday house is situated in one of the quintessential small beachside towns of the Central Coast that are scattered along the eastern seaboard. Close enough to Sydney yet far enough to feel like a break, the cute beachside shacks which previously sat on large blocks are now long gone with their precious land sliced up to make the most of these highly coveted sites. Breezeway House responds ingeniously to this, creating a generous four-bedroom home-away-from-home for multiple families. The house twists and turns along its linear plan to savour of the views it’s afforded while maintaining its privacy from the surrounding built up sites. Impeccably detailed and playfully resolved, there is a real sense that love and care have been taken to design and build this house, from the fastidiously crafted timber joinery down to the perfectly cut brick shelf to place found treasures from the nearby beach.

The long linear plan is suited perfectly to the constant comings and goings of holiday life, allowing the building to open and shut as needed, while celebrating each moment of the journey. Breezeway House is a holiday house that is light-hearted and fun; where detail, material and spatial experiences will surely invoke many fond memories in the years to come.


NSW AIA Jury Citation: Award for Interior Architecture

Breezeway House is highly evocative, drawing on signals of summer retreats past to provide a space that embeds serenity alongside joyful anticipation. This dual interaction with nature and companionship unfolds masterfully in the hands of an experienced and talented practitioner. The house is composed from a simple structure of room and corridor. The corridor is almost externalised, connecting the occupant to the outside environment mostly through feeling rather that sight. Understanding with precision the nature of this decision, the architect develops a particularised approach to habitation. The bedrooms are like cloisters whilst the living spaces are nuanced and persistent, shaping their use and prospect to light and view. Such persistence applies to the private nature of the public uses of this house. A prime example is the intimate look-out balcony on the roof which allows for one person alone to be in the landscape.

This house provides an exemplar of interior experiences that are precisely related to their function. It also provides an important apprehension of the significance of a spirituality in habitation. It does all these things by elevating the everyday requirements of light, colour, material, detail and furniture by proffering a residual love of the tasks to hand with every element, seen and unseen.