Whittling the weekend away: the island boot camp where young architects learn old tricks

In an old corrugated iron shed on a rise above the Tasman Sea, two men sit staring at a wooden bird. “I’ve been working on this orange-bellied parrot but the head’s still a bit boofy,” grumbles architect John Wardle as he gives a frustrated rub to his cropped grey hair, then hands a vaguely budgie-shaped knob of Huon pine to Kevin Perkins, one of Australia’s finest woodworkers. “It’s not,” continues Wardle, pointing to Perkins’ own jaunty bird, which sports a recognisable beak and tapered tail, “like yours.”

Perkins, a gangly 74-year-old with hair and beard as white as surf spray, could be expected to reply: “Of course it’s not! I’ve been doing this for more than 50 years.” Instead, he holds his tongue, takes the parrot-in-progress from Wardle, and replies in his dry way: “Yep, he’s still a bit of a boofhead!”

As Perkins whittles some of the heft from the bird’s head, he talks hypnotically about the run of the grain and how to work with, not against, it, about growth rings, knots and twists. At this moment he’s the master, Wardle the apprentice. The latter is both an artful maker and an inveterate hoarder of hand- and machine-made objects: ceramics, utensils, antiques, figurines, textiles. But there’s one aspect of making that the multi-award-winning architect is evidently yet to master: the venerable craft of whittling. Wood shavings seem to come away from Perkins’ carving knife like peelings from a spud. The object takes on a more elegant, more sculptural, and at the same time more realistic form. The architect looks on with a child’s wide-eyed wonder.

The architect and the artisan have come together for a unique event in the Australian architecture world. It’s one that Melbourne-based Wardle, who has a blossoming international reputation for contemporary buildings imbued with the warmth and refinement of traditional craft, holds most years at his 440-hectare sheep station on Bruny Island, off Tasmania’s south-east coast. Architects from Wardle’s Sydney and Melbourne studios – he employs 100 staff in total – come to Bruny expecting to leave transformed. Joining them on the island are craftspeople and local tradies. By night, the visitors camp out in the open – Perkins has his own tent – or grab a mattress inside. By day they get to work making stuff.

Wardle’s charges come to his boot camp hoping to become better architects – and something more than architects. Hands used most days for sliding a mouse over a pad, pecking out messages, or holding café lattes, get dirty, sunburnt and sore. The young designers are learning from Perkins and others how to become makers. They may not ever become crafty, but Wardle’s hope is that the experience might expand their sense of design, and their characters, too.

I arrive at the “Bruny making weekend”, as Wardle calls the four-day event, after an hour-long dawn drive from Hobart and a ferry across the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, silvered in the early morning light. North and South Bruny, low lying for the most part and bone-dry in mid-summer, are two ragged pendants joined by a thread-like isthmus called “The Neck”.

Wardle’s North Bruny property lies at the end of a dirt road, just past an old apple-packing shed. At its heart is a beautiful architectural ensemble: the Shearers Quarters, built in 2011 by Wardle in honour of a shearing shed lost to fire on the same site, and Captain Kelly’s Cottage, an old colonial-era building remade by the architect – and made new.

These dwellings, to which Wardle, his wife and three children retreat every few months, stand side by side on a bluff between two coves with dreamy views of the restive southern sea. They also serve as the social hub of the making events and other functions: concerts, symposiums, conferences.

Wardle, who is in his early 60s and usually dresses in understated urban wear, comes to greet me in cargo shorts, work boots, baseball cap and sunglasses. He sports a rascally three-day growth and oozes calm and self-confidence. Shaking my hand – we’ve met before – he scoffs at my city hatch: there are so many four-wheel drives and SUVs at the property that it resembles an off-road convention. I’ve arrived a few days into the event and the making projects – Wardle’s own pet project is his orange-bellied parrot (the endangered species breeds in Tasmania) – are well underway.

“As architects, we design,” Wardle tells me, “but the act of making is different. We might discover that designs can’t be made or need to be made differently. Making things requires finding solutions on the ground. We’re working on a shoestring budget at Bruny, learning about ingenuity.”

Battered by sea and wind, Bruny Island is the Tasmanian capital’s playground. Hobartians with enough dosh keep their dachas here, which they like to call shacks. Wardle fell in love with the island two decades ago. Not content with a mere holiday home, he purchased this working farm in 2002. For a decade he improved the land and planted trees. Then, in a dynamic period between 2011 and 2016, he designed two timber buildings – or more accurately, redesigned one and built another entirely. Together, the two dwellings have put Bruny on the architecture world’s map and vaulted Wardle into its premier league.

The first, Captain Kelly’s Cottage, was named after a Hobart mariner who built the original house for his daughter in the 1840s. Significantly revamped by Wardle, it was recently described by the Royal Institute of British Architects as “a beautiful celebration of the process of construction and of making”. The second, the new building known as the Shearers Quarters, won the celebrated Robin Boyd Award, Australian architecture’s top prize for a new residence, in 2012.

Both structures, contemporary classics of Australian architecture, share the same landscape and the same architectural language: at once rootsy, sophisticated and contemporary. Together they have become poster children for a refined and place-sensitive approach to contemporary residential architecture in Australia.

Wardle wasn’t overly surprised when Kevin “Grand Designs” McCloud invited himself to stay at the Shearers Quarters. Describing the building, which he had only seen in photos, as “the most beautiful thing”, McCloud implored the architect on local ABC radio: “John, if you’re listening, I’d love to come and stay.” Wardle promptly issued an invitation to McCloud, who visited last month. The buzz about these two Bruny dwellings rings so loud that Tasmanian architects are inclined to roll their eyes at the mere mention of them. “Of course, they’re great,” a young Hobart architect tells me. “John built them for himself. He didn’t have a budget, or a client. They should be great!”

Yet it’s easily overlooked that Wardle, who designs larger public buildings with the same attention to nuance and craft – his new Southbank home for the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music is studded with 66,000 egg-shaped terracotta-coloured ceramic tiles – is challenging his profession. The Bruny making weekends are not simply feel-good jamborees. His insistence that young architects learn from craftspeople and artisans, that they, in his words, “become students to people who would conventionally just make what we’ve dictated”, is a tacit critique – a gentle rebuke – of architectural arrogance and monomania. It’s a radical gesture.

The architect’s parrot project, taken on a few days earlier because his staff chivvied him after he was tough on their own whittling efforts, is destined for a nook that Kevin Perkins has hollowed from the leg of a recycled table. It’s one of several op-shop tables the young architects – under the supervision of Melbourne-based fine furniture maker Bryan Cush, whose Sawdust Bureau often works on Wardle’s projects – are mashing together into one big tabular jigsaw. The work has its origins in a small-scale composite table that Wardle created for Captain Kelly’s Cottage: a rectangular 1830s gate-leg dining table joined to a circular 1840s table, with a panel of myrtle between them.

When completed, the new mega-table will be gifted to the North Bruny community hall. “A community is made up of individuals who fit together in different ways and at different angles, some touching and some not,” Wardle tells me. “Why not have a community table that represents the idea of a community?”

A young architect from Wardle’s practice, Stephanie Pahnis, is standing at a vice with a chair leg in its jaws, in earnest discussion with a man built like a doorframe with springy, ginger-brown hair. He wears a sweaty blue singlet and speaks indistinctly below the din. Her brown eyes blink nervously above a dust mask. Justin Jones’ nickname is Chainsaw and he is directing Pahnis, who co-edits an architecture magazine titled Caliper Journal – that world is a long way away – to slice a Milwaukee Sabre saw through a table leg a few centimetres from his own meaty hand. Her job is to cut the legs into segments and reassemble them in a jumble to make quirky candle-holders.

“But your fingers?” Pahnis asks of Chainsaw, lowering her dust mask. “They’re just a little too close … for comfort.”

“Don’t worry about them,” he growls. “Let it rip. Go full bore!”

The saw roars to life and Pahnis slices through the chair leg. When it’s done, her eyes brighten with a kind of primal pleasure, and perhaps a touch of relief.

Kevin Perkins (second from right) and helpers affix an old tree to a stump, which will serve as the setting for 12 whittled bird sculptures. Credit: Chris Crerar

I walk with Wardle down the rise. The late morning sky is cloudless, the pasture bleached, the land parched. But a fresh breeze stirs from the sea. I can spy the two dwellings, spread across a rise above a low dam. The Shearers Quarters, with its skillion roof at the rear and a gabled roof facing the ocean, is the more distinctively modern structure, even though it riffs on the original shearers’ shed. The seaside cottage named after Captain James Kelly, with its steeply pitched roof and wraparound verandah, its forest of chimneys and prominent water tanks, has a more familiar, colonial homestead profile. But my arrival at these two finely crafted essays in landscape, history and place is delayed by another making project. An open-air spa, which Wardle calls rather grandly a “Bath House”, is tucked in behind a copse and perched above the cove.

A team is busying itself around the circular concrete bath, which sits above the ocean. They pause from their work, hands on hips, when the boss approaches. For a few heartbeats there’s silence. The ocean itself seems to pause for an intake of breath before a wave breaks on the shore below. Weathered beach pebbles stir, chime and clatter.

The architect and his wife, Susan, retreat here once every few months to recharge, and a more romantic setting for an outdoor hot tub could scarcely be imagined. Wardle had wanted to position two claw-foot baths here, but he could only get hold of one. So he opted instead for this circular sheep trough, which his staff are lining with fine Japanese tiles from the same company that made the ceramic ones for his new Melbourne Con. “I’ve just got to keep the sheep out of it,” he says, an almost imperceptible smile spreading across his broad face.

On the seaward side of the spa is a fire pit to heat the water, and trailing away, across a small bridge towards the cottage, is a path of broad sandstone pavers. Wardle designed the path to remain flush on its landward border, expressively ragged on its seaward side. “It seems to represent human order on the one side and the other the natural way of things,” he says as we walk beside it.

Following this path up the rise, I come to the timber cottage built by James Kelly and resuscitated by Wardle, who has managed to seamlessly dovetail the new and the newly restored. On the verandah, two sumptuous Huon pine benches made by Kevin Perkins with whalebone armrests seem to laze in the morning sun. These and other relics were recovered, Wardle explains, from one of Captain Kelly’s old whaling stations at Adventure Bay on South Bruny.

Turning past the northern corner of the cottage, I see two whale ribs, placed apart like outsized parentheses, standing against a beautiful drystone wall. The wall gives shelter to a century-old walnut tree, and a mulberry, and these in turn provide shade to the cottage.

Inside the cottage, the space is simply laid out. The original two-storeyed seaside front has been retained and adapted, and a new living space inserted between it and the original gable-roofed kitchen to the rear. A new light-flooded central section takes in the view to the east along the verandah, south across the bay, and west when the vertical shutters are opened. Some of the original timber-frame brickwork has been retained – particularly in the original kitchen – as well as a few pages from early colonial newspapers, printed in narrow columns and antiquated fonts, exposed when work began in 2015. But the interior is clad for the most part in Tasmanian oak. So deep-seated is Wardle’s arboreal obsession that the television is concealed by a wooden panel.

The architect takes me to his kitchen with the two-into-one colonial table – prototype of the community table under construction in the shed – and a collection of Bendigo Pottery vases. In the living room, framed and placed beside the fireplace, is a map of the world as Captain Kelly saw it. Says Wardle: “He was a mariner with a global perspective and we wanted his – I mean our – house to be intensely local, but also global.” He steps towards the built-in seat and lifts a cushion. “Portuguese textiles,” he says with a hint of pride. The curtains have been made in Kolkata, the tiles come from Japan, and the lights, naturally, Milan.

Meanwhile, a set of built-in shelves displays ceramics and mementos from as far away as Japan and Sicily. Wardle loves to truffle around the world’s junk shops, and there’s nary a piece in this home to which a story isn’t attached. Not all the stories provoked by these objects are of far-flung places. The door handle is an axe grip: a nod to the local forestry industry. Wardle made the writing desk himself.

The sea and the landscape are a constant presence in this house, but so, too, is the past. It combines an almost Japanese spatial simplicity with the boisterousness of a big party. The guests may not be present physically, although their ghosts fill the rooms. Wardle has made the most of the material to hand. On this cliff face, when first he saw it, was a dilapidated colonial cottage and the burnt remains of a shearers’ shed.

“It’s important as an architect to enter the lives of people,” Wardle reflects. “I’ve had a constant fascination with why things exist the way they do. If I see a building in the landscape, I want to know who built it and why, and why it was made in that manner. I like to think that in contemporary society an awareness of where we’ve come from helps us to chart a better course towards the future. Architecture has a place to play in that. It’s not romantic or nostalgic; it’s a curiosity about the way the past and place combine to create the world in which we exist.”

As we continue our walk, the architect points out other collective “making” projects from years past. There are 16 blackwood trees planted in a circle; a platform, fire pit and rotisserie; and close by, a terracotta and steel sundial. “It only seems to tell the time from 11.10 in the morning till 3.05 in the afternoon,” he says in a tone that invites, but never strains for, laughter.

These join the projects underway this year, including a set of flagpoles and a tiled kiln the shape of a midget submarine sitting in a bare field. The kiln makers, Ben and Peta Richardson from Ridgeline Pottery, have a special place at the event. “I’ve learnt over time,” Wardle says sotto voce, as if divulging a secret, “that ceramicists make the best bread.”

Is there a risk in cluttering the landscape? He pauses, seemingly taken aback. “Most of these projects are pretty modest. Of course, the idea has its limits. It won’t go on forever. But I hope to build a massive makers’ workshop” – he points towards the water’s edge – “with a pottery kiln. Perhaps we’ll have residencies here.”

Participants work on the open-air spa, made of concrete and lined with Japanese tiles.Credit: Chris Crerar

Wardle’s sheep station is sheltered from the boisterous westerlies that sweep across these latitudes all winter by a hillock, and in the cleared land between its wooded peak and the beach, another of this year’s projects is taking shape. Wardle leads the way and we march up to join a team led by Alexandra Morrison, a young associate of his practice.

Perkins and Chainsaw have joined this small team of architects. “My only brief was to do something with this stump,” says Wardle. “I’d thought that just as pirates in Cornwall used to lure boats to shore with false lights, we could put a torch here, but … well.” Clearly, it wasn’t a goer.

Perkins responds to his minimalist brief by fixing an old dead tree limb onto the stump. The splayed branches of the dead tree bolted onto the stump support some 12 birds whittled from King Billy pine. A kingfisher, on a slender pole, looks to have taken flight, while a very creditable owl, whittled by Morrison, sits broodingly on one bough.

Wardle has reputedly been tough on his charges’ efforts with carving knife and chisel, but Perkins is a little more generous. “It was the first time whittling for most of them. They probably won’t do it again, but look,” he says, raising his eyes towards the bare branches backlit by a hard blue southern sky. “They’ve got some nice expressive birds out of it.”

By the time I make it to the famed Shearers Quarters, it’s lunchtime. A few of the young men from Wardle’s practice have stripped to the waist and are showering in the open air, but most of the architects, tradies, woodworkers and ceramicists are inside. The place is crowded. After a brief look-see and a wander down the surprisingly spacious length of the timber-clad building – some of the timber came from old apple crates – I beat a hasty retreat.

Outside I again bump into Morrison, who was deeply involved in planning the event. Wardle had earlier mentioned the “wonderful tangle” of working at his practice and at the same time “being totally engaged with these projects down at Bruny”. Speaking to Morrison, I realise that the contagion must infect half the office. “We spend weeks before going down to the island, designing John’s projects,” she says. “We work as if he were the client – but it’s always pretty much a disaster. Nothing really seems to work. The land is too steep. The bricks are too heavy. The stone’s not quite right.”

Unlike some others flagging under the physical burden – lifting rocks and laying bricks – she bounces on her toes and talks rapidly in punched-out phrases. “We have to change the premise. We come down with these perfect designs from our perfect computers but nature’s not perfect. It has its own way of working. We have to adapt to it.”

John Wardle and Alexandra Morrison practise their whittling skills.Credit: Chris Crerar

When I call Morrison a week later, she still has Bruny on the brain. Perkins had taught her how to work with tools; a lesson she’ll never forget. “We were forced to engage the hand and brain in the intuitive sense of a traditional maker,” she reflects. “It was incredibly satisfying to witness the subtle form and features of a bird emerge from a timber block.” The hours Morrison spent modelling bird forms also attuned her to the real thing. “Kevin has inspired me to become a greater observer of birds,” she says, “and to pay attention to their curious behaviours and distinct features, things that make them unique to Australia.”

A little later the same day I reach Wardle, who is rushing between flights, on the phone. I inquire after his orange-bellied parrot. More than a week after it was begun, he admits, it remains unfinished.

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