Tidal Arc House

Project Details

Project Description

With an arresting house set confidently on the edge of a peninsula coastal town, Woods Bagot is redefining how architects respond to the Australian landscape.

Tidal Arc House is in Flinders, a small town on the Mornington Peninsula, 85km south of Melbourne.

Eschewing the colonial planning grid and repetition of the local timber clad cottage in favor of sensitivity to the heroic topographical context, Woods Bagot makes a radical departure from the prevailing Australian beach house vernacular with this self-assured, three-story dwelling named for its distinctive curved form mimicking the massive water movement of the Southern Ocean.

At first appearing large and foreign, the house settles readily into the landscape. Clad in fossilized limestone, clam shell patterns are embossed into the surface – a nod to the area’s Jurassic coral geology.

The team mapped and monitored the site to create a dwelling entirely of its place.

The house follows the contours of the cliff. Tilted to the pitch of the earth’s surface, the roof provides shade from the descending western sun and invites the morning sunrises in, while the sense of movement created by the home’s sweeping edges intermittently mimics the local tidal movements.

Curving with the sinuous twists and rhythms in the landscape, the plan forgoes parallel curves and right angles entirely.

The house tears itself apart across the horizontal plane. The fracture creates two curved volumes precariously stacked on top of each other, like sheared basalt plates. The gymnastic torqueing of the geometry allows full exposure of coastal views from the upper level while settling the lower level guest bedroom plate into a protected rear sunken courtyard.

An open south-facing deck leads into a sweeping living space, neatly separated from the master bedroom wing by a timber and stone clad staircase. At the lower level a double-height entrance peels off to either the living space above or to a private zone with three self-contained bedrooms shielded by curved, timber lined enclosures. Descending into darkness, a wine cellar and plant room occupy the subterranean basement level.