Responding to Aspect – Mossy Point House by Edition Office
When Kim Bridgland, Co-Director of Edition Office, was asked by extended family to design a house in Mossy Point, a home that embodies the studio’s penchant for crafting buildings of graceful austerity unfolded, cultivated to foster a sense of clarity both internally and externally. Looking down over a topography of roofs, treetops, box gutters, back sheds and beyond to the endless expanse of the sea, Mossy Point House has emerged with a design language that overtly responds to aspect.
Nestled at the midpoint of a landscape that tapers towards the crescent-shaped coastline of the Tasman Sea, Mossy Point is a sleepy haven on the southern New South Wales shoreline. Swelling with holiday makers in the summer months, although without quite the same intensity as nearby Batemans Bay, it is a place with a strong community spirit and a resonant equanimity between nature and an established residential frontier. The elevated site captures these qualities and basks in the view of the ocean beyond the town. “In one sense it’s a challenging site,” admits Kim, “with part of the design focused on resolving the view. In another sense it’s extraordinary because of the view, which takes in the beach, bay and [Tomaga] river.”
Shepherded by the narrative of its site, Mossy Point House engages seamlessly with its context, leveraging architecture as a medium by which to simultaneously amplify and modulate the surrounding coastal landscape whilst delivering a home attuned to the needs of its occupants. Clad in grey barestone panels, the exterior of the home echoes the smooth, silvery bark of the towering spotted gums, assuming their strength of purpose and constancy. Inside, mobility and accessibility were primary drivers of the interior design process, which has forged an aesthetically, functionally and materially resilient home. Layout and essential amenity have been covertly woven throughout with consideration given to oversized doorways and clean rails with a functional duplicity, supporting the home’s full-time residents as they enter their senior years whilst overtly celebrating lifestyle. The result is an elegantly modest home of meticulous resolve, where grown children and grandchildren can settle into the enduring Australian beach holiday rhythms that so poignantly cultivate memory-making.
“Conceptually the house wanted to be a couple of things,” says Kim. “It really needed to be robust and efficient given its modest budget, but it also needed to be acute in its design.” Mossy Point House’s details and the resolution of the project are consciously sharp, conforming to the curative essence that has come to define an Edition Office project. Whilst the home assumes a “foreign” aesthetic, unapologetically defining itself as “a new presence in town,” it seeks a reconciliation with the existing built environment, holding both old and new narratives. The architectural composition continues the surrounding rooflines, unfolding as a modern iteration of a low-key ‘fibro shack’. Presenting as a single-storey building, the home is perched on a series of parallel blockwork walls and has evolved to mediate between the built, the natural and the nuances of contemporary liveability.
In recasting the quintessential Australian beach house for permanent living, Edition Office has edited Mossy Point House to the extent that it has landed on a perfectly reductionist palette. The predominant use of a single interior material – hardwood plywood – coaxes the hushed qualities of the spaces below the towering gums outside, instilling an atmosphere of composed sanctuary. On entry, the exacting detail of a sharply angled wall draws navigation left or right. It immediately gives the impression of this being a deliberate, incisively designed home with facets, surfaces and planes appearing as seams within a precisely folded geometry. To the right, the public, social zones of the home are revealed. Living and kitchen are one homogenous volume resting beneath a slanted ceiling clad again in russet-toned hardwood as a continuation of the walls, which take cues from the spotted gum hardwood floors. In this sober field, elemental impressions are emphasised, dancing across surfaces, lit by a spectrum of illumination to become cinematic. Utilities are concealed, integrated and minimal, storage dovetailed meticulously throughout to address pragmatics without compromising ambience.
“There is a bird’s-mouth cut-out in the roof, which creates an outdoor dining space on the deck,” Kim explains of the intent behind the diamond-shaped void – a means of “trying to find one move that would unlock everything about what this house does.” Spatially “it sets up a fulcrum point” with the social half of the home to one side and the private part containing two bedrooms, an ensuite and two studies to the other. A solid balustrade runs all the way along the front deck space, foreshortening the view inside whilst emphasising the soaring verticality of the spotted gums all around. “It frames the connection to the things you want to connect to while maintaining privacy inside,” Kim says.
The lustre of southern light, sabred in through the tree canopy, becomes a metric by which to experience Mossy Point House. Time, seasons and atmospheric qualities are defined, conversing with the interior without distraction. “The use of a mono material is something we are consistently interested in with interiors,” explains Kim. “Here, one plywood surface wrapping everything allows you to feel a relationship to volume and light. The other gestures are in the background visually.”
Split below the roofline, this effect on the social half of Mossy Point House conjures an atmosphere of inclusion, elevation and the sense that the home is part of a larger ecosystem. On the private side, a distillation of daylight lays a filter upon spaces for sleep and self-care. “They are consciously not looking on to the river but to the quietude of the spotted gums and ferns,” blanketed in darkness by night as the living room and deck become a platform for observing the constellations and the inky silhouettes of the gums.
The lustre of southern light, sabred in through the tree canopy, becomes a metric by which to experience Mossy Point House.
“Anytime you are looking back through the house, through the southern light washing past and around the fulcrum moment, there is an especially intriguing quality of light and shadow working together,” Kim describes. Cantilevered eaves to the north, various ceiling heights and materiality orchestrate the chiaroscuro of expressions tempered by a resounding candour across the built elements. Beyond the light, however, Mossy Point House is emblematic of the rituals of its occupants, bringing the detritus of life into awareness against the simplicity of its volumes, its balanced composition and the over-arching efficiency of a home of deep humility – a stage upon which life’s story plays out.
