The Edge, Port Douglas: Charles Wright’s vision in concrete

Why this concrete bunker in the tropics is lauded as the ultimate beach house.

TWAM-20150620 EMBARGO FOR TWAM 20 June 2015 NO REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION The Edge, Port Douglas Pic : Patrick Bingham Hall

In this age of hyperbole, the “ultimate beach house” is a common brag — though some really do live up to it.

Not because they marry mod-cons and money with the world’s best waters, but because they artfully pivot around the paradoxes of contemporary life, with primary regard for the sea. They slow city-speed to an “in-the-moment” engagement with the elements, they are big on surprise and structural ingenuity, and they remind us that holidays are a removal from our everyday lives.

The ethos of connecting to nature in full luxury is clear in this beach house overlooking Four Mile Beach in Port Douglas, far north Queensland. Its architect, Charles Wright, calls the carbon-neutral, cross-ventilated, cantilevered concrete bunker a “platform for living”, in accordance with his view that seaside architecture should approximate luxury camping — minimally framed shelter with a nurturing amenity that removes all pressure to maintain appearances.

From the outside, the single-level structure (named The Edge) looks like an alien spaceship; inside, it reveals its spaces by sequence, which builds an element of surprise. A batten-lined entry foyer conceals a living hub, off which flow two bedrooms with inside and outside sleeping options. Wright says the house was “schemed akin to a hard shell”; an abstraction of an auditorium that opens to sea views while shielding it from the scrutiny of a tourist scenic lookout at the property’s rear.

“Our client required a safe and secure retreat with absolute visual and audio privacy,” he says of its siting on a hillside that slopes down to the beach. “This house represents a successful mediation of opposing priorities between public and private place, in the form of a new contemporary tropical housing prototype.” Its style has nothing in common with its Federation-style neighbours.

What earned it Building of the Year in the 2015 Far North Queensland Regional Architecture Awards was its resolution of the tricky relationship between building and horizon line. “Big deal,” I hear you say. Well, you can’t appreciate how big until you’ve done time in a house that dulls all surrounding drama with an overabundance of sea and sky. All the rooms have been angled to the water, and ceilings are raked to follow the roofline down towards the windows and veranda. The effect is a cinematic disclosure of the horizon.

And it’s amplified by the infinity pool at the building’s edge — its blue seems

to spill into the sea. “Ideally, there is a seamlessness of experience in which thresholds are not consciously registered,” says Wright, putting in a nutshell how he contrived an inner sense of freedom, spatial and psychological, “an unimpeded and direct connection to the ocean from all living spaces”.

His sculpting of structure belies an initial schooling in fine art and a fondness for John Lautner — the late Los Angeles architect who removed barriers between inside and out. Like Lautner, Wright mixes a cocktail of rough-cut concrete, stone and wood with a complement of “quiet” customised furnishings, so that interiors are suggestive of caves — the sort a Bond villain might inhabit.

But the only villainous happening in these parts, remonstrates Wright, is the poor choice of material for houses that are constantly exposed to a corrosive climate. “The ultimate beach house is an immersive environment that doesn’t eat your money in maintenance,” he says. “It’s one that frees your field of vision, in every sense.”