From the architect:

Torquay is the official starting point of the Great Ocean Road and the birthplace of Australia’s surf culture. It is a place that carries a particular weight; not just in summer, when the town fills and the breaks are crowded, but in the quieter months when the coast reveals a different character entirely.

It is that version of Torquay that shaped this house. The winter mornings in the national park, the heavy skies, the damp tracks through the scrub, the subdued and rugged tones of the landscape once the holiday season has passed.

Positioned directly on the national park boundary, the home sits deep within the surrounding eucalypt canopy. The trees press close on all sides; their filtered light, constant movement and scent become an inseparable part of experiencing the home.

The architecture was designed to heighten this connection by inverting the traditional plan and moving the living spaces to the upper level; an upside-down house in the most deliberate sense.

Here, full-height sliding windows retract entirely into the wall, opening the living spaces directly to the treetops. The breeze moves through, and the birds and branches are ever present. In summer, the home feels like a treehouse: open, breezy, sandy-footed and alive. In winter, the same space closes around a burning red gum fire, the park held quietly beyond the glass.

The building was conceived as a singular sculptural form; a resolve that came naturally from the client’s own background in concrete. The exterior is expressed in concrete across two distinct textures: the ground floor finished smooth, the upper level heavily sandblasted.

A slight overhang marks the shift between the two planes, giving the mass a quiet tension. At street level, the facade is largely closed, preserving the integrity of the sculptural arc. At the upper level, the concrete gives way to glass, opening the home entirely toward the national park.

Vertical timber louvres are arrayed across the window surfaces, and from within the parkland, these elements read as an extension of the surrounding tree trunks; the new form dissolving softly into the dense canopy behind it.

From the exterior inward, the material palette moves through concrete, venetian plaster and timber. Board-formed in-situ concrete carries the grain of the timber formwork across its surface. Polished concrete floors and cast in-situ ceilings run through the living spaces; intentionally durable, and built to be lived in.

Curved Venetian plaster walls and rounded thresholds soften what is otherwise a heavy build. At the centre of the house, a sculptural staircase rises through all three levels: a continuous hand-trowelled plaster form in which wall, balustrade and base are resolved as a single unbroken object.

It is the spine of the home. At entry level it draws you simultaneously up and down; arriving upstairs, you emerge into the heart of the house. Every corridor curves, the plaster walls bending softly through the plan so that the home unfolds, rather than directs. A slot of light falls from above, catching the texture of the surface as it rises.

The building is also set back from street, with a garden placed between the two. This separation lends the home a sense of privacy; it belongs to its site without imposing on it.

The interior palette was drawn directly from the landscape beyond the glass. Mustard yellow; the tone of eucalypt bark caught in late afternoon light, sits against walnut joinery and cool concrete.

Dark green stone introduces depth. Treetop House reflects the studio’s ongoing interest in the tension held within a heavy building; one that curves and bends its way toward something gentle. A robust house that knows when to open and when to hold you in.

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