Beachside bliss, from the Great Ocean Road to Margaret River

At seaside properties around the country, winter is the new summer.

TWAM 15 Aug 2015

Close your eyes. Crisp, salty air cuffs your cheeks; high above, a lone gull’s squawk is swept away by a sudden gust.

Bracingly cold waves foam around your ankles. The beach could be your own. Emerge, blinking, into the low-angled sunlight to see the shore has on its winter clothes. With sand cracking softly under bare feet, there’s a sense of breaking ground. In the high season the beach is picked over, but now it’s easy to find a pretty shell that’s lain untouched for days. Bundled up in a jumper, you head indoors to a crackling wood fire where you toast frosty toes and, a robust red wine in hand, your good sense in booking a seaside holiday for this time of year.

Cold weather and beaches do not traditionally go together. But with luxury accommodation geared to the elements lining the coastlines of Australia, could winter become the new summer?

At the Pole House, a spectacular holiday rental on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, it already has. “Our busiest period, and the period I love best, is in winter because there’s no one around, the beach looks fantastic, and you can watch the storms come in across the ocean with a fire in front of you,” says property owner Kathi Adams. She and her husband Raymond bought the house — perched on a huge concrete pole 40m above Fairhaven Beach, and accessed by a long, narrow walkway — in 2006. Built in the ’70s by architect Frank Dixon, it was then all shagpile carpeting (on the walls) and green-bottle lightshades, and had fallen into disrepair.

The couple had the original timber house demolished, and Franco Fiorentini of Melbourne’s F2 Architecture designed a minimalist update with floor-to-ceiling retractable glass windows revealing a sweeping 180-degree sea vista that extends from the Split Point lighthouse to the thriving tourist town of Lorne.

“The architecture back then didn’t allow them to do what we could do now with glass and steel,” Adams says. “You come down the walkway and you feel engulfed by the environment, like you’re floating in air.” At just 8m by 8m, the structure is akin to a luxury hotel room; it’s self-contained with an open-plan living area and kitchen and a retractable bed. There’s a “floating” fireplace that hangs from its own chimney and perfumes the house with the distinct aroma of burning red gum. “As soon as you walk in, the smell of the fire always makes you feel safe — it’s kind of elemental; it must be hardwired into us,” Adams says.

On the other side of the country, in the holiday hamlet of Eagle Bay, on WA’s Cape Naturaliste, a wood-burning hearth also lends cosy charm to Picquet, an opulent, five-bedroom house by designer Dane Richardson. The copper-clad building overlooking the beach embraces the elements; instead of corroding, the exterior has taken on a variable patina that will keep improving with age. “Copper gets almost a wood grain on it once it starts to age and weather,” says Richardson. “The patterning is really beautiful.”

The warmth of the house’s copper skin is offset by slabs of local limestone and glass, lots of glass, to take in the majestic dune-ocean-horizon panorama. In winter, it’s a scene of barren and windswept grandeur and you’re likely to have it to yourself.

Eagle Bay is a rarity in Western Australia — it’s an east-facing beach offering shelter from the more blustery sea breezes and, for early risers, a view of the sun coming up over the water. It’s part of Meelup Regional Park, which is home to sea eagles and kestrels, and features walking trails lined with jarrah trees and wildflowers. It also belongs to the wider Margaret River wine region and you know what that means: the perfect accompaniment to snug fireside chats.