The Longhouse, Daylesford, Vic
The Robin Boyd award winner distills the essentials of living in an integrated design grounded in sustainability.
“It can look like a dead animal, but thankfully today it’s more like a thriving plant,” says architect Timothy Hill of the gently undulating landscape around Daylesford, central Victoria, in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range.
We spin past a copse of blackened trunks, ominous traces of a recent bushfire, take another sharp corner on the dirt road, and there ahead is Longhouse, winner of this year’s Robin Boyd award for residential architecture.
True to its name, the structure is fabulously long. Perched on an exposed rise 520m above sea level, it extends for 110m along an east-west axis beneath an even longer roof designed to harvest rainwater stored in 340,000 litre capacity tanks.
With a height of approximately 8m and a width of 9m, it’s an imposing — and from a distance rhythmical yet rather plain — intervention in a landscape of gullies forested with eucalypts and stretches of pasture vibrant green after good spring rain. And yet the Longhouse is also a geometric echo of the wide panorama over which it presides.
“Utterly extraordinary,” is how the jury described it. “Challenging in its questioning, enchanted in its outcome.”
Timothy Hill designed the building more than a decade ago for a couple, Ronnen Goren and Trace Streeter, who aimed to start a River Cottage-style orchard and market garden on a 20 acre farming property, along with a professional kitchen and cooking school, rooms for guests and farm workers, a chicken coop, a stable, and all the accoutrements of sustainability.
The first thing to go up was the steel frame, followed by the translucent cladding of glass-reinforced polyester designed to admit UV light at different levels of intensity to, as Hill puts it, “balance the summer and winter”. The result is a building that sits lightly in the landscape despite its substantial scale, and is luminous within.
It was only with the completion late last year of the centrally placed kitchen of terracotta and white tiles housing some serious culinary equipment — a contrast to what Hill describes as the more “sheddy” structures under the same roof – that the project was completed.
The building’s residential, hospitality, educational and agricultural functions, which on a conventional farm would be dispersed across the property in different types of buildings, are wrapped up and contained within this one stretched rectangle whose rain-harvesting mega-roof sustains life — animal and vegetal. Hill describes it as a “protected world” providing shelter from the shearing winds and a defence from foragers that would make minced herbage of the kale and cabbage plants, the almond and orange trees. The result is a climate-controlled greenhouse enclosing an oasis, with large panels that can be opened to admit light and air or closed to seal the environment hermetically tight. These are made of a more tensile material.
Outside, left to fend for themselves in a fenced enclosure with a windbreak of olive trees, are more extensive plantings. A dead white tree — a favourite of cockatoos — twists and contorts in the middle of the northerly view framed by an 8m long strip window.
Mount Franklin is just visible in the right-hand corner. An old stone wall, partly restored, meanders across the rise. The window’s dimensions give the view the quality of a panoramic capture, ever changing beneath the shifting shafts of light from a cloudy sky.
Hill says he found the view “imposing” when he first saw it, and an appreciation of its power seemed to justify, at least aesthetically, the size of the building. To do otherwise would have meant being “diminished” by it.
It’s certainly a busy landscape. Standing at the window soon after arriving, I notice two crimson rosellas on the lush green lawn. A little later, a flock of chunky corellas settled on the same stretch of grass. “It’s that time of day, explains Hill, pointing out towards the east where grey kangaroos graze almost motionlessly.
“Listen,” he says moments later with a finger raised towards the roof. “The first drops.” He designed the building, he explains, so that the sound of rainfall would become a feature of its inner life. After the storm passes, the clouds clear and the westering sun casts its rays over the landscape, catching the building aslant and caressing its polyester skin. “It’s like living inside a lantern,” says Hill, who seems as enchanted by the building as its two owners.
“It’s one thing to passively watch the end of the day,” he says.
“To sit on the deck and observe. But what if the coming and going of the storms, the rising and setting of the sun and the moon, if all of these things were amplified by the fabric, the situation, the organisation of the building? Wouldn’t it be terrific if a building could make a sunset more magnificent, more dramatic — even richer?”
This was the task he set himself, and while it reflects an ambition to connect with the natural world, it is not, he insists, “a shed-based tribute” to the vernacular tradition of bush architecture.
The Longhouse was informed not, Hill continues, by a “lyrical narrative about place”. Says the former principal at Brisbane practice Donovan Hill, which was founded in 1992 with Brian Donovan and now, minus Hill, is incorporated into BVN: “It’s the proposition that matters.” The proposition involves the “miniaturisation” and “incorporation” of a contained and village-like assembly of structures.
The idea has a venerable tradition in the working villas of European landed estate owners. The Palladian villa, in particular, was an inspiration. At Palladio’s Villa Elmo, for example, the “barchesse”, or storage buildings, were integrated into the main villa so that the master, as Palladio himself explained, “may be able to go every place under cover”.
Hill takes the Palladian ideal of integrating outhouses and more refined residences and adapts it to the particular needs of his clients, and the landscape itself. “The Longhouse recalls a Palladian tradition of including living, working, storing, making in a single suite rather than referring to the Australian habit of casual dispersal,” he says.
“It emphasises how much — or how little — you need for a few people to survive and thrive. A handful of animals, enough water and year-round crops”.
The result is a structure deeply rooted in the life of the land and at the same time bookended with delightfully nuanced residences. The more easterly suite is called The Lodge and the more westerly, abutting the chicken coop and stable, the Stableman’s Quarters.
The Lodge, with its sky-blue walls and ceiling, is compact, its spaces compressed. On the ground floor is a central kitchen flanked by a dining room on one side and a small lounge room with low day-bed to one side. Much use is made of horizontal windows, at different levels, that engage the landscape and fill the rooms with light.
The dominant colour of the Stableman’s suite, reached up a vine-clad stairway, is rose. The ceiling, which follows the barn-like vault, is clad in peach-toned insulation.
A splay of brassy pendant lamps hang at different levels from the ceiling, and if guests are intimidated by the bed above a curtained utility block, there is an outsized crimson day bed beside another of the Longhouse’s signature horizontal windows. The textures of these residential quarters are varied – filigreed tiles, polished plywood floors, sumptuous fabrics — in stark contrast to the raw cyprus beams used elsewhere in a rural oasis at once practical and fanciful.
I leave Longhouse with Hill the next morning, having seen how a building might dramatise a sunset, a storm – a sunrise too. As we drive past the forested volcanic plug of Mount Franklin, the architect wonders aloud how to best describe his creation. It’s not an easy question to answer, for the structure is in many ways a country estate contracted into a singular form, with multiple functions and materials, rationally organised and poetically executed. It is utterly unique.
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