Coastal Garden House
living private°
Coastal Garden House is a private residence located in Bronte, Sydney. The project was commissioned by Andrew & Chloe Podgornik, with architecture by Neeson Murcutt Architects. Coastal Garden House was completed in 2017.
Size: 1,240m2
Scope: Concept Design, Development Application, Detail Documentation, Construction
Coastal Garden House has been recognised with the following awards:
2018 AIA National Award (shortlisted)
2018 AIA NSW Award for Residential Architecture (Houses New)
2018 Houses Award - Garden & Landscape
1. Pool garden with mural by Sonia Van de Haar (above left)
2. The garden is immersive and private (below left)
3. Pool cabana and entertainment terrace (above right)
Integrated living and landscape
Connected living and garden spaces
Living room with integrated indoor planting
A wild garden counterpoints the robust architecture
Foundation stones from the original home were salvaged for new garden steps
Pond Garden
The casual flamboyance of the house is matched in the exotic, episodic garden that engulfs it.
- Neeson Murcutt
Trampoline Garden with a transplanted frangipani and sandstone floater relocated from the original garden
Ligularia reniformis under a dramatic cantilever
National Architecture Award - Jury Citation
Coastal Garden House is a sustained investigation of placemaking. Located along a diagonal contour, the project recuperates an existing garden while holding to the rim of a remnant gully. The stable pivot of the house is a vertically prominent living space around which two volumes splay and reach into the garden. External and internal circulation calibrates the natural topography, so that walking by the house is also recollecting the landscape and being-with the place. Together, these moves dematerialise the building, rendering it as a series of pavilions that merge into canopy and foliage. Vertical discontinuity between the three floors counteracts horizontal fluidity at each level. Interiors are disposed cinematically and frame discrete views of varying scale – an enfilade of rooms; the intricate grain of the garden; the surrounding urban fabric and, beyond, the monumental scale of promontory and ocean. The building is modestly scaled and formally restrained, contributing notably to the amenity of its public domain. The street treatment is simple and unimposing on the outlook of nearby residents and the experience of coastal walkers descending towards the beach. This project is an accomplished work of civic generosity, contextual integration, precise tectonics and refined materiality.
Houses Award - Jury Citation
A garden is one of the most compelling symbols of home. The design brief for this project was a large house, however, the architects responded with a strategy for a large garden. Here, a new flamboyant family home is set in an exotic coastal garden that preserves and intensifies a former domestic garden on the site, grounding and immersing the family and their domestic rituals in a terraced, episodic sandstone rock terrain.
The house is designed to be engulfed by its garden, but it is also seen as an extension of it - archaic, cave-like, a re-occupied ruin - with aspects of nature finding their way inside through random stone floors, planted roofscapes and creepers negotiating its exterior walls.
There is also an allusion to the larger landscape gesture of its place; the epic spatial quality of nearby Bronte Beach, with its natural amphitheatre of sandstone and verdant gullies, is found miniaturized in the form of the house and its cantilevered, weathering concrete surfaces, and a slow, meandering descent to the swimming pool. It is an ambitious idea for a garden, at the scale of the home.
