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Architects: Blok Modular, Vokes and Peters
- Area: 595 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Christopher Frederick Jones
Text description provided by the architects. The collaboration between Blok and Vokes & Peters culminates in the completion of a trio of modular beach houses, elegantly crafted for three sisters whose fond memories of holidaying at this site trace back to their teenage years. Designed with equal frontage to ensure equity and harmony, each house features a central garden that is open to the sky, infusing the elongated, narrow floor plan with light, air, and a touch of greenery.
The scheme is intended to be in keeping with the original scale and format of a modest, lightweight beach house, while offering a balance of communal living and privacy. Thus, it is considered more appropriate that the project is legible as a single two-storey dwelling rather than a series of typical multi-storey units. Articulation is achieved by a shift in colour and a recess of the lower level at the street façade, as well as having no solid walls on the front elevation, which allows the depth of rooms and occupation of the public spaces to be legible.
Positioned at the beachfront, each residence uniquely layers a living room above a kitchen. These spaces are seamlessly connected through a double-height verandah that opens expansively to the dunes, blurring the lines between the built environment and natural landscape.
The colour shift at this datum line is maintained throughout the whole project, which also celebrates the more sustainable modular construction method – the lower level modules being a light blue colour and the upper level modules being white. The powdery light blue colour choice is a poetic reference to a faded blue and white timber boat which might be found pulled up onto the beach, and it is also an intentional reference to historical fibro beach shacks found in the area. The light blue colour allows the building to blend with its context of vast sky and turquoise water. It is reminiscent of the intermittent glimpses of sky and ocean visible through trees and clearings in the natural landscape as one drives from the ferry to Point Lookout.
The building has a strong diversity of material and colour visible from the street, including clear-oiled hardwood decks, two paint colours, an earthy coloured exposed-aggregate driveway, anodised aluminium window frames, and coloured interior walls of the bedrooms facing the street.
The project is intentionally understated, and we believe that the introduction of a third colour into the screens is problematic. It could give the impression of a third storey and the illusion of building bulk if another horizontal band is shown. If a third colour is included as a vertical colour band for the full height of the building, it will be visually disruptive as it would not relate to any structural reasoning and would compromise the legibility of the two-storey composition expressed throughout the rest of the project.
The construction process saw each home composed of four prefabricated modules, which were fully completed at the Blok factory in Brisbane. These modules were then transported to the island on a chartered barge and carefully craned into place over two days, marking a significant achievement in modular architectural design.
