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The centrepiece cantilevered pool performs both a recreational and visual function appealing to both children and adults. The clients love to entertain and are able to do this (loudly) whilst children sleep in the guest wing. They have stated many times that the house has delivered more than they ever imagined, and once filled with family and the elements of their life, immediately felt like home.

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The clients yearned for a grounded and calming home, a sanctuary from their demanding professional lives. These tones then informed the other material selections namely warm caramel burnished concrete floors and the ochre toned spotted gum timber cladding which also had to be bushfire resistant. The stone needed to be local and the tones had to reflect the warm tones in the landscape. The mudstone walls were the core material, a selection made collaboratively between client, architect and stonemason. We super-insulated the floor, walls and ceilings, employed a continuous thermal break along the internal perimeter, fully enclosed the subfloor and provided a commercial scale solar/battery storage system together with a geothermal hot water heating and ventilation system. We coupled the thermal massing with an internal west facing courtyard and a fully glazed western perimeter. The requested south facing views presented major efficiency challenges, addressed via the mudstone wall elements, the concrete floor and sub-floor providing thermal massing inside the house.

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We solved this by creating a linear sequence of pavilions segmented visually and physically by a series of mudstone bookend walls. This proved not to meet the client’s expectations of expansive views from every space towards the water (south). We began with an inwards focused courtyard house with maximum solar exposure and concentrated coastal and rural views.

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The cellar provided guidance to the logical location and layout for the new house, but the question was how to orientate the building. He had left us with a gaping wound courtesy of an excavated house site above an infamous underground cellar with a tunnelled access to the rocky foreshore below the site.

We had intimate knowledge of site conditions via a partially unbuilt work for the previous owner. The design progressed through a series of iterations based on our desire for a successful passive solar building. The site is a large semi-rural battle-axe block with challenging bushfire exposure, complex biodiversity overlays and a rugged cliff-side coastline to the East and South. Responding to the many natural and manmade constraints of the site, the highly crafted design is an attempt to add to the ecosystem rather than imposing itself on it. Tinderbox House is, at its core, a practical, understated family retreat, for a successful and local Tasmanian family.

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