A Tiered Coastal Landscape – Gordons Bay House by Secret Gardens & Milieu Creative

Words by Rose Onans
Architecture by Milieu Creative
Photography by Katherine Lu & Nicholas Watt
Video by Cheer Squad
Interior Design by Milieu Creative
Landscape Design Secret Gardens
Styling Studio CD

Gordons Bay House by Secret Gardens and Milieu Creative is a waterfront family home with the perfect modern garden and landscape design to match.

Perched on a steep incline in picturesque Gordons Bay (Sydney, Australia), a tiered landscape and garden design from Secret Gardens sees the outdoor spaces match the uncompromising and site-specific house they surround.

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Perched on a steep incline in picturesque Gordons Bay (Sydney, Australia), a tiered landscape and garden design from Secret Gardens sees the outdoor spaces match the uncompromising and site-specific house they surround.

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Through warm hues of walnut, solid timber and timber veneer provide an anchoring point to the white and grey layered elements that open up the home and welcome the light.

A passion project of sorts for Secret Gardens founder Matt Cantwell, the brief for the waterfront family home was simple but demanding in its own right. “The garden and landscape design needed to complement the architectural style of the waterfront family home, but the clients also wanted something unique and confronting,” Matt explains.

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A passion project of sorts for Secret Gardens founder Matt Cantwell, the brief for the waterfront family home was simple but demanding in its own right.

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The infinity pool and its ocean views are rivalled only by the showstopping rooftop garden at the front of the property.
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Working within the inherited footprint, the project saw the architectural and interior renovation of a previously closed-off home, in which Davina Bester of Milieu Creative injected a sense of warmth and connection to the site through materiality, openness and key texturally refined elements to create the new waterfront family home for the clients, her brother Aidan and wife, Aleks.

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“The garden and landscape design needed to complement the architectural style of the waterfront family home, but the clients also wanted something unique and confronting,” Matt explains.

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Bay House steps down its site, utilising its interwoven terraces and platforms to create a series of private and openly connected zones, truly making the most of its unique location.

Opening up to its ocean view overlooking Gordons Bay, the connected living, dining and kitchen space welcomes in the waterfront views and the aural and aromatic additions that come with it.

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The intimate courtyard areas, complete with olive trees.

Achieving a balance of intimacy and ambition, a feat made all the more impressive by the project’s inherent challenges, Secret Gardens have created a dramatic and textural modern garden and landscape response to the site and the home’s architecture.

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Across the site, landscape elements are used to soften the transition between the built and the natural and create moments of relaxed intimacy.