Why it can pay to let your architect decorate the house, too

The love of craft is seen in the hand-made objects and gizmos that feature strongly in Wardle’s buildings, and here too at Bass Coast House. The next Fin Magazine is out on August 19.

Bass Coast Farmhouse creator John Wardle is framed by the shutters that protect the home from often brutal winter weather and searing summer sun. Sean Fennessy

Luke Slattery

Aug 18, 2022 – 9.56am

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When John Wardle was accepted into his first year of architecture at RMIT, he was also offered a place in the school of industrial design. “I spent a few weeks of that summer agonising over which direction to take,” he recalls. “Eventually I chose architecture, but the love of industrial design has never left me.”

At Bass Coast Farmhouse, Wardle’s latest creation on the dunes behind a 12-kilometre stretch of pristine East Gippsland coast, a set of black wheels attached to worm drives sit near the windows. Turned by hand, they open
the shutters that keep the dwelling secure when it’s uninhabited, on its 66-hectare patch of coastal heath.