Luxury holiday house in Tasmania: Avalon Coast Retreat
This striking architectural sanctuary offers solitary bliss but is best shared with friends.
A stay at Avalon Coastal Retreat, perched on its own bluff above Tasmania’s east coast with heroic views across Great Oyster Bay to the Freycinet Peninsula and Schouten Island, would be best shared with friends. This spacious yet minimalist three-bedroom pavilion, designed by architect Craig Rosevear for Hobart entrepreneur Brett Torossi, can certainly accommodate a group. That’s how I’d planned to experience it until, one by one, the five friends who’d pledged to join me dropped out. And so, alone and slightly discombobulated, I head to this paradisiacal waterfront haven for a few nights of reclusive luxe.
It’s cloister quiet when I step inside and shuffle along the polished concrete floor to the chef’s kitchen stocked with a gourmet minibar: eye fillet steak, cheeses, olives, crusty bread, pasta and sauces all, metaphorically, with my name on them. I assuage my wounded social pride by doing what I would have done had I arrived with a noisy crowd oohing and ahh-ing at the big blue view. I head straight to the fridge, and pop open a bottle of bubbles, determined to toast the spectacle.
As the afternoon stretches out, I settle in with a book on a leather couch of oceanic dimensions and conclude that a solo stay in a place of singular beauty isn’t a bad idea at all. The sun sets over the hills inland and the evening sky darkens into a dusty version of the blue-grey sea. When I turn off the lights and step onto the deck, a whorl of stars shines as if a grand celestial switch has been flicked. I see why the Greeks looked at the same spectacle and thought of milk, their word for it being gala, which in time becomes galaxy — our Milky Way.
The kitchen, dining room and lounge of Rosevear’s pavilion are wrapped in glass, and the effect from this bluff, rising 20m or so above the sea, is stirring and romantic. You could be standing on the bow of a ship, or atop some Aegean caldera; instead, you’re at your own wild outpost on the edge of the world.
Avalon Coastal Retreats is one of a string of high-end properties developed by Torossi. She started searching for a site about two decades ago after one of her two sisters moved to Tasmania from Sydney.
“I really fell in love with the east coast. I remember thinking, ‘It’s my kind of country’,’’ she recalls. “So I started to drive up here, to try to pinpoint exactly the stretch I wanted. I narrowed it down to south of Swansea, north of Little Swanport. There were a few properties, but for the most part the land was regarded as rubbish country you couldn’t do a thing with. Well, I thought it was very special country. Along this stretch of coast you could experience space, and you know that Indigenous plants and animals can be preserved here. It’s timeless. It hasn’t changed much since the Ice Age … the feeling is one of peace and inspirational calm. It was all about allowing people to feel that.”
The dwelling she chose for the site makes no attempt to mould into the landscape. It’s a concrete, glass and steel structure of hard angles that juts assertively forward on its windswept knoll. Torossi is a fan of German-American modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, particularly his famous Farnsworth House, a classic of early modernism. She commissioned Rosevear to adapt the Miesian ideal of floor-to-ceiling glass and structural clarity to this dramatic sea cliff. It’s a paradox of early modernism that it blurs the border between nature and shelter with an architectural language derived, in the first instance, from industry and machinery. The structure is hard; the experience soft.
The geometry of the house may be simple, but the interior is idiosyncratic and characterful. To brief her architect, Torossi took a walk along the beach and, as she recalls, “collected shells and driftwood and took colours from some lichens and put them all into a bag and sent it to him with a note that read, ‘Here’s the palette — have fun!’ ”
There’s a Huon pine bathtub in one bedroom and plenty of art on the walls, as you’d expect in a house kitted out by a collector with 40 years of experience. One of the most touching is a painting in naive style of three women and a dog in a rowboat. It’s a night scene, and they look to have witnessed a fiery event — a comet streaking across the sky or a volcanic blast — for their bodies are aglow and they wear expressions of surprise. Torossi bought it at the Red Hill Consolidated School art show on the Mornington Peninsula for next to nothing, and when she arrived to pick it up the artist was waiting for her. “She was quite overwhelmed and wanted to know why I bought it. What touched me? ‘It’s beautiful,’ I told her, ‘and with moist eyes ran off’.”
On my last morning I take Torossi’s advice and, in blazing sunshine, walk the loop from the house down to a secluded beach past a reed-bordered pond with an almost lacquered stillness. The water temperature is Tasmanian so I’m out again in a jiffy and when I walk back up the rise, white sand in my boots, it occurs to me I’ve been fortunate — even blessed. It’s as if I’ve spent two days at sea, without once leaving land. I’ve watched time pass, in exquisite airy solitude: a collaboration between art, architecture and nature.
TO-DO LIST
Walk
The loop down to the private beach and back again, stopping off at the reed pond on the way.
Visit
Maria Island, a 30-minute ride by passenger ferry from Triabunna, which is a 20-minute drive from the retreat. The island is of immense historical and geological interest but perhaps its biggest attraction is its wombats, which are so thick on the ground they’re deemed a “tripping hazard”.
Dine
If you must venture out, The Fish Van on the esplanade at Triabunna prepares fresh local seafood while you wait.
Read
Terre Napoleon: Australia through French Eyes 1800-1804 offers a fascinating insight into the early French exploration of Tasmania’s east coast.
Essentials
Avalon Coastal Retreat is on the Tasman Highway at Rocky Hills, less than two hours’ drive from Hobart and Launceston.
Luke Slattery was a guest of Avalon Coastal Retreats.
This article was originally published in May 2021 and has since been updated.