Yanakie House by Richard Stampton Architects

An intriguing series of volumes that welcomes and closes off from its bushland locale, this Victorian residence explores and pushes the defined boundaries of what a house can be.

Australian bushland, in all its diverse forms, is complex and evocative. To build within it and unavoidably destroy part of it is a troubling prospect for any architect. Late in the 20th century, Australian architectural luminaries such as Glenn Murcutt and Richard Leplastrier drew on a modest, rural vernacular to distil an architecture seemingly at ease within this environment. Gradually, their approach became cemented as the authoritatively ‘appropriate’ response. These were beautifully wrought buildings, but so convincing that they were quickly aped, and their sensitivity to specific conditions translated into a somewhat dogmatic, underthought and generic response.

There’s no sense of when one has crossed the threshold into ‘the house’, nor when one has left the bush.

Richard Stampton’s Yanakie House is a highly refined and considered response to its coastal bushland context but distinct from those progenitors of the now-dominant lineage. In challenging conformity to these paradigms, it contributes to reopening the question – perhaps unanswerable – of how one ought to build within Australian bushland. The house draws out its context’s peculiarities in ways unlike the rehashed tropes of contemporary Australian architecture, broadening how architecture might attune us to this landscape.

Yanakie House is not a single building but a cluster of rammed-earth and concrete cylinders, varying in height, diameter and proximity, accommodating the dispersed program: two contain bedrooms; one is a bathroom; the largest provides a kitchen, dining and living space; the smallest is a storeroom; and four are water tanks. This disintegration has an obvious consequence – to move through the house is to experience the conditions of the bush, to hear the raucous screech of cockatoos drowning out the crunch of dried leaves underfoot, to catch the smell of the eucalypts or to feel the first drops of rain on a dash back to a bedroom. More than just bringing these unique sensory experiences into the home, it allows the bush – its patterns of light, weather and seasons – to have a greater influence on the rhythms of domestic life.

The house draws out its context’s peculiarities in ways unlike the rehashed tropes of contemporary Australian architecture, broadening how architecture might untune us to this landscape.

Separated into discrete structures, without any immediately obvious pattern, there is no clear sense of when one has crossed the threshold into ‘the house’, nor when one has left the surrounding bush. Moving through this vegetation, tree trunks and low foliage oscillate between obscuring vision and then unexpectedly aligning to suddenly reveal farther vistas. The same is true of the house; walking around or through these structures, views to the surrounding vegetation or distant coastline alternate between being shorn short and then dramatically thrown open again, establishing a continuity of visual experience.

A ‘typical’ house, within a single envelope, establishes an implied front, back and sides, primary and secondary axes and discernible directionality. In contrast, bushland is without directionality and frontality of this kind. Without any clear front or direction to its circular forms, Yanakie presents no break from these spatial qualities of bushland, and the effects of front-suggesting elements like doors are countered by both their multiplicity and varying orientations.

Richard Stampton’s Yanakie House is a highly refined and considered response to its coastal bushland context but distinct from those progenitors of the now-dominant lineage.

There is little in the exterior of these structures that evokes the image of ‘house’ – they are far closer to resembling storage tanks or infrastructural outbuildings. Encountering an infrastructural building amid bushland is notably distinct from happening upon a house. The latter, laden with connotations of ownership, stands apart from the landscape; the former, though in no way natural, shares an apparent indifference to human registers of form or scale with natural landscapes. At Yanakie, the blankness of the facades, the uncertainty of entry and the scattering of unoccupiable tanks and stores among occupiable rooms all assist in constructing this infrastructure- and landscape-like indifference to interiority and occupation.

Alongside these evocations, the cylinders’ apparently solid, stone-like and monolithic appearance and the peculiar way they are scattered can’t help but bring to mind more archaic structures: megaliths, standing stone circles or fragments of ancient ruins. In their apparent age, obscurity and permanence, these archaic remnants – and, by invoking them, the structures of Yanakie – seem more in step with the ecological timescales of natural landscapes that gradually reclaim them than with the fleeting, routine temporalities of domesticity.

There is little in the exterior of these structures that evokes the image of ‘house’ – they are far closer to resembling storage tanks or infrastructural outbuildings.

There is a complex ambiguity here, absent in typical contemporary Australian work that gives over as much as possible to a continuity between interior and exterior. Though these rooms at Yanakie establish strong connections with the surrounding bushland, there is also a dramatic division between interior and exterior. Contrary to tired gestures of maximum glazing, there is a striking exclusion of unbridled views. In most rooms, the outside is only visible through narrow vertical slits cut into massive earthen walls, and from the outside, the rooms appear impenetrable from many angles. The metal screens encrusted over the cylinders appear armour-like, protecting something precious within. This is a house that manages to cultivate continuity, exposure and connection, but also seclusion, protection, domesticity and retreat.

Articulating this dichotomy seems entirely appropriate. It is a nuanced position within this vexed problem of building in bushland: working with an awareness that no building can be completely appropriate, harmonious or continuous with this context. More importantly, a building generates disruptions and destruction – often unintentional and unavoidable – and ought not to veil this through espoused unity with its surroundings. Though a careful work of architecture may establish diverse and deep connections, it will always stand as fundamentally distinct and apart from this natural context. Stampton’s Yanakie House suggests how architecture might work to manifest these irresolvable dualities and the problematic status of a building in the Australian bush. Its success lies in still being able to draw out the complex and subtle beauty, wistful moments of quiet and absence, sublime age and enlivening youth of the bush, all in an attempt to find home in this landscape.

Architecture by Richard Stampton Architects. Build by Martin Builders.