Daylesford Longhouse by Partners Hill

As a farm, household, cooking school, event site and guesthouse built on the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung people of the Kulin nation, Daylesford Longhouse’s diaphanous yet resilient superstructure is driven by protective manoeuvres, deductive reasoning and disciplinary knowledge.

The project exists at the intersection of a series of systematic processes, each rigorously pushed to breaking point in order to produce a scheme that is somehow both unflinchingly direct and enigmatically exuberant. “We have to be assured, of course, that it’s not original and there’s no creativity, right? I watch myself very carefully to make sure that I’m never creative,” says Timothy Hill, architect-dramaturgist and founder of Partners Hill. He describes Daylesford Longhouse as many things: a bar graph, a buffer zone, a route, an inner territory, a participatory encounter with plant life and a mannered shed. Noticeably absent from this list are terms that frame the building as a fundamentally new object, or a formalist interpretation of its physical context. Hill clarifies, “what I mean is, there’s nothing to do with inspirations and breakthroughs or any of these other things. It was actually designing the conditions to make it seem like it was inevitable or that nothing had happened.”

“The clients accepted that if they kept following the relentless logic of being rational, then that was our pathway to being poetic,” explains Hill.

For Partners Hill, working closely with clients Trace and Ronnen, such an approach demanded a sustained commitment to a demystified architectural process. “The clients accepted that if they kept following the relentless logic of being rational, then that was our pathway to being poetic,” explains Hill.

A preliminary sketch plan points to the overarching 110-metre-long shed structure as something between territory and architectural element. Drawn as a framework more than a hard boundary, the shed collects within it a series of much more pronounced envelopes. Referring to this early representation of the project, Hill observes that opening the design process with questions of territory through the plan has emerged as a key aspect of the Partners Hill approach. “We’re very into this reverse figure ground thing and the way that it can almost reverse itself, so that the container at Longhouse, which makes the territory, then has within it things that are seemingly just objects – but you’ll notice that you can’t comprehend any of them in the round.”

Tracing a path through the rational toward the poetic, there are moments when the building affords unexpected and intriguing details.

This attitude also plays out in the way that pieces of the program are described and detailed as individual buildings rather than rooms across the project. There is just one entrance to Daylesford Longhouse, through a large hall space that separates the animal enclosure on the west from the vestibule and ancillary spaces of the stableman’s, or “pink building”, to the east. Passing through the vestibule and into the protected gardens of the inner territory, the cooking school’s kitchen volume with mezzanine condenses circulation along the northern edge of the shed, before opening back up into garden space again, revealing a bathhouse with sauna and upper-level lounge. Finally, the “blue building” of the guesthouse establishes the project’s eastern gable.

Tracing a path through the rational toward the poetic, there are moments when the building affords unexpected and intriguing details. For example, the timber-framed window and screen in the blue building appears in an almost ornamental capacity within an internal elevation of the open cypress-framed dining structure. A testament to the scheme’s conceptual clarity, these gestures do not go unnoticed, but nor do they call attention to themselves as self-conscious acts of whimsy.

“Everything is different when you can’t comprehend the building as an object. It’s a big part of trying to transfer your experience into one of experience in place.”

It is also possible to hold the immediate contextual response to site alongside an equally astute understanding of the planning strategies that resist presenting the building as an object, as in the houses of Erik Gunnar Asplund and Edwin Lutyens. Paraphrasing and reimagining these ideas, the placement of doors at Daylesford Longhouse – particularly within the entry sequence and vestibule – plays with the hierarchical arrangement of multiple openings as part of the route along the inner territory of the shed. “What’s clever [about Asplund and Lutyens’s work] is that, by putting all the openings in the one plane, you never end up perceiving the building as an object, because you never go around the back,” explains Hill. “Everything is different when you can’t comprehend the building as an object. It’s a big part of trying to transfer your experience into one of experience in place.”

Recognising the layers of systematic thought at work in Daylesford Longhouse is revealing, as it demonstrates the limitations of each reading when attempting to describe the project. Partners Hill holds a more specific interest in the breaking points constructed by the intersections, tensions and overlaps between these approaches. As Hill points out, “everything we do is deeply systematic, and we’re positive about the fact that we’re likely to come across some moment when it will fail. And then that’s the thing that gives us the hint about how to reconcile the failure, not pretend it didn’t happen.”

Architecture, interior design, landscape design and furniture design by Partners Hill. Build by Nick Andrew Construction. Engineering by Tim Hall & Associates. Branding by Studio Ongarato. Brickwork by Elvis and Rose.