Hervey Bay House by Bark Design Architects First House
The simplicity, elegance and detailing of Bark Design Architects’ first house have made it timeless.
From the time that I commenced my architectural studies at the University of Queensland in 1983, I worked with both large and small practices in Australia and the United Kingdom. Since 1997, I have worked in Noosa with Stephen Guthrie, my partner in practice and life. Hervey Bay House is the first house that we designed together as an “emerging” practice, Bark Architects. To provide context, my reflection on our first house is interspersed with quotes from others along the way.
Our first commission, which was won through a competition in 1998, was for a regional art gallery on the Sunshine Coast. In parallel with this project, we undertook several cultural and residential projects, including a handful of houses. The Hervey Bay House was the first of these to be built and was an ideal example of nurturing a collaborative design process from first principles and including our clients and team in the journey.
As acknowledged by Miranda Wallace, the curator of the Place Makers exhibition (which featured the Hervey Bay House) at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in 2008, “[Lindy Atkin and Stephen Guthrie] were already highly experienced in designing houses for the climate and topography of the Sunshine Coast, having between them worked with Gabriel Poole, Lindsay and Kerry Clare, and John Mainwaring. Atkin worked for several years for the high-tech British architects Richard Rogers and Nicholas Grimshaw, and with Future Systems, a relatively young and experimental London-based practice. This experience informed her understanding of the possibilities of lightweight steel construction and minimal efficient design.”
Created for a young couple, the Hervey Bay House is a simple, long, thin house with all its living spaces open to the north, capturing the natural breezes and water views of the bay. Divided by an outdoor living zone, the lightweight glazed pavilions are linked by an ambiguous indoor/outdoor breezeway that encloses a protected, calm courtyard on the south.
Breezes from the bay are filtered through the openable glazed edges and extracted through a series of rotary roof ventilators to create a comfortable temperature. Galvanized steel portal frames provide a clear legibility of expressed structure and a sense of lightness, which contrasts with the more grounded masonry element of the courtyard and garden wall within an overall palette of natural materials and colours.
Movement through the house is along the continuous “spine,” which provides privacy to the south
In their first collaborative house design,
Lindy Atkin and Stephen Guthrie were influenced by their experience with boundarypushing local and international architects as well as the horizontality of the surrounding landscape.
and serves to anchor the structure and locate the house in the landscape, emphasizing its horizontality and relationship with the panoramic view.
Our broad design intentions for the Hervey
Bay House were to provide a series of elegant and wellproportioned spaces that embraced the ocean horizon, whilst demonstrating a structural legibility and economy of lightweight materials for easy coastal living in the subtropics.
Peter Skinner’s citation for the 2007 Australian Institute of Architects Chapter Awards complimented the design, saying, “This is an elegant linear house, designed to maximize views to the Fraser Coast and fully exploit the climate, with all its subtleties. The crispness and clarity of the detailing establishes a confident modern aesthetic that permeates the whole house. The fine standard of workmanship and the outstanding value for money that this scheme achieves is due in no small part to the architects’ painstaking care with every detail.”
We still refer to some of the principles tested in this house: climatic orientation, seeing the sky, seamless flush thresholds, services along a central “spine,” simple planning and organization of spaces, strategic use of thermal mass, steel portal frames for speed of construction and superior bracing capacity, sustainable use of plywood and hardwoods, large awnings and generous roof overhangs.
Hervey Bay House brings together many of our ideas about architecture; however, we believe that the two most important lessons learnt with our first house were making spaces that simply feel good and aiming to create design that remains timeless.
Architect
Bark Design Architects +61 7 5471 0340 barkdesign.com.au info@barkdesign.com.au
Project team: Lindy Atkin, Stephen Guthrie, Tim Juckes, Phil Tillotson Builder: Paul O’Rourke Engineer: McWilliam Consulting Engineers