An Honest Anchor – Matilda by Templeton Architecture

As a celebration of the natural and remote setting the home embraces, the comprising elements of Matilda offer an honest robustness, textured and nuanced. Templeton Architecture combines a sense of stability and permanence to this occasional home through an anchored weightedness, beautifully refined and optimising the building’s enviable siting.

Nestled into the lower contour of its undulating terrain, Matilda sits steadfast and weighted to its site. Located in north-eastern Victoria, the occasional home neatly takes occupancy in a place nostalgically linking its client to the land, taking them back to their childhood in Ruffy. While refined and referencing a modern sensibility through its linear and clean approach to form, the laboured detailing and expressed junctions offer an evolved expression of time, while also engaging with nature. In its remote and rural location, the home is surrounded by a natural and uninterrupted setting, one that welcomed an embrace and captured through select apertures, curated views from within. Templeton Architecture brings an understanding of the weathering conditions and responds through a robustness that expresses an honesty in the material elements comprising the home.

With its increased thermal mass, passive heating and cooling becomes a natural feature of the home as a result, and the interplay with light with the layering of its comprising compacted sediment affords the home a welcomed richness.

Built by Harvest Building Pty Ltd, Matilda stands as an embrace of its location while also firmly planting itself as a permanent and stable fixture. As a counterbalance to the inner urban weekly home, this weekender was imagined as part escape, part immersion. Both as a home for themselves and for visiting guests, the spatial planning needed to respond to flexible program fluctuations as needed. The use of rammed earth as the main and central construction element is multifaceted – setting a muted tonality for the rest of the home. With its increased thermal mass, passive heating and cooling becomes a natural feature of the home as a result, and the interplay with light with the layering of its comprising compacted sediment affords the home a welcomed richness.

Set amongst the granite hills of the area, the home responds through its elongated and low form, hugging the earth and stabilising itself through an inherent and thoughtfully imbedded robustness. Accompanying the rammed earth blade walls, Australian timber and stone come together with steel elements and matt-faced joinery to complete the picture. As both a protective place of shelter from the elements and a welcoming home to convene and gather, Matilda embraces its position looking out at the landscape and its eucalypt varieties through its generous and minimally trimmed glass openings.

Accompanying the rammed earth blade walls, Australian timber and stone come together with steel elements and matt-faced joinery to complete the picture.

Muted and calm, Matilda sits comfortably in its setting as a place of refuge and restoration. Templeton Architecture has infused subtle elements of drama through boldness and cohesion, and the resulting home will continue in its timeless and relevant for many years to come.