If last week’s design-i on Graeme Gunn seemed personal, this week’s story is even more so.

I grew up on the far south coast of NSW, indigenous Yuin country – particularly Tathra and Merimbula. Well, grew up as I gained more experience in the six holiday weeks on those beaches, than the other ten and a half months in a stultifying Sydney school. And one day in Xmas 1967, as a teenager looking for surf, I came across this house when it was under construction.

I bailed out of the red AP6 Valiant wagon whilst my mates got waves at Nelsons, and took some B+W instamatic shots of this creature from a foreign world. Wish I could find them now, because they mark the exact moment I wanted to be an architect. I’d heard Harry Seidler 3 years earlier at the opening of Australia Square, and that made architecture seem interesting, but this made me want to do it.

I now know a bit more about the house, and its architect, which is worth telling.

In the late 1950s David Yencken, of Merchant Builders fame (see last week), had commissioned Robin Boyd to design the Black Dolphin Motel in Merimbula and, being in love with the area and its Spotted Gum forests, bought 30 hectares on the south bank of Nelson Inlet for a holiday house. He commissioned Graeme Gunn, project architect for Boyd on the motel, for a modest weekender in the bush.

The story goes that Gunn presented a concept design double the initially conceived size, disregarding the budget. Surprisingly the response was not rejection but “the house has to be built”. A split levelled five-storey tree house of timber posts and beams, so striking in its diagrammatic form and relationship to the landscape, that Yencken would make this dream a reality “somehow or another”.

The material chosen was an early form of CCA (Copper Chrome Arsenate) impregnated timber that was being pioneered at an experimental facility nearby called Penders, founded by Ken Myer and Roy Grounds. The early trials were with local gum trees, particularly Spotted Gum, Corymbia Maculata, as used on ‘Baronda’. These hardwoods later proved difficult to manage and were replaced with Radiata Pine, and the system was commercialised as ‘Koppers’.

The house is made of a series of cubic masses that reach out, cantilevering in sections towards the north and the panoramic views of the surrounding bushland and Nelson Creek. These ‘boxes’ are rationalised in a nine-foot grid of timber posts, which shift in parts to expand into balconies and living areas. It is elevated to make the most of these views and protect its occupants from oppressive sandflies.

The fulcrum of the spiraling masses is a locally sourced bagged brick core for fireplaces on major levels. Running alongside this, a u-shaped timber staircase accesses the five split levels that meander upwards and outwards. The conviction was to utilise appropriate locally sourced materials - “if there had been rock, it would have been made of rock”, Gunn explained.

The timbers and their joints are championed at all points. Posts and beams are visibly bolted, timber boarded walls are left unpainted, as is the bagged local brick, joists are exposed and so is the sarking behind, held tightly by a light steel mesh.

The house is also off grid, as much about the design principles as the drive it takes to get there. Electricity is captured via a stand-alone solar-system, it is serviced by bottled gas and a septic tank, and rain water is collected and drained to an underground tank.

The local Bega Council rejected the original proposal on the basis that the only enclosure of the house was a series of canvas blinds, noting this would “not prevent the entry of dampness into the building” - ever a finger on the pulse. Windows, walls, and doors were added, and the house design (as built) was given the go ahead, and is exactly what we see today. Peter Tonkin wrote a wonderful ode to Baronda in ArchitectureAU in 2010.

Yencken and family donated the property in 1979 to the newly established Mimosa Rocks National Park, alongside other properties owned by the Grounds' and Myer's families. They leased back the land hosting the house, but handed it back shortly after Baronda was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register in 2013.

And the answer to today’s headline question is that it gave me my profession, which in turn gave me the opportunity to design houses for the descendants of Roy Grounds and Ken Myer. Both houses deeply informed by my love of Yuin country, learnt in large part from Graeme Gunn’s masterful house.

design-i #4, 6 Nov 2024. Researched and written by Tone Wheeler, architect / Adjunct Prof UNSW / President AAA. The views expressed are his, as are the images. design-i is a new column on design ideas that replaces Tone on Tuesday. Old ToT columns can be found here and you can still contact TW at toneontuesday@gmail.com.

Tone Wheeler

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