One of my favourite television programs as a child was the award-winning mid-week drama A Country Practice. Running from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, the bucolic series followed the life and times of the tight-knit community living and working in the fictional New South Wales town of Wandin Valley. The storylines were primarily told through the lens of the hardworking and beloved general practitioners, the doctors who ran the private medical clinic and staffed the little hospital. The country GP is a superb generalist, looking after multiple generations of local families with care, comprehensiveness and continuity, always on-call in the case of accident or emergency. This good general practice for doctoring has some similarities to the work of contemporary architects practising outside Australia’s capital cities. Founded on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast in the mid-1990s, Bark Architects is an exemplar of such a practice, and the engaging story of the Sunrise Studio unfolds like a good Monday-night episode of A Country Practice.
The prodigious residential architecture portfolio of Bark Architects includes transformational adaptations of existing houses, ambitious new dwellings on spectacular coastal sites with expansive Pacific Ocean views, and countryside villas that embrace and tune to their landscape settings. Alongside these widely published and acclaimed homes, the practice has completed public buildings for government clients, including the welcoming Noosa Junction Station precinct and the community-enriching Curra Community Hall. The practice’s founding directors, Lindy Atkin and Stephen Guthrie, are also very active and effective in advocacy and leadership in the local architectural community – including the activities of the Australian Institute of Architects and Sunshine Coast Open House, which began in 2017 and is chaired by Lindy. These energetic general practitioners have created a context-responsive, local practice that serves its community well through private and public projects.
The mature trees on the site have been retained and the house is oriented to maximize northern light and cooling breezes. Artwork: Jai Vasicek.
Image:
Christopher Frederick Jones
It was through the Sunshine Coast Open House program that Lindy and Stephen first met Simone and David, the clients for the Sunrise Studio. Simone and David relocated from Sydney to the Sunshine Coast 10 years ago and are the proud and studious custodians of a Gabriel Poole Quadropod building, the 1983 Lewis House. Gabriel Poole is one of the country’s most acclaimed architects, and his innovative Quadropod houses deploy a steel-framed structural system that is well-suited to steep sites and the construction of lightweight, prefabricated houses. Simone and David have generously opened the structurally and spatially intriguing house to the public as part of the annual Sunshine Coast Open House weekend. It was at the 2018 Open House event that Simone and Lindy first met, and that early conversation led to a commission for Bark Architects to design a secondary, independent dwelling on the verdant hillside site. This engagement has evolved into a neighbourly friendship, with Bark Architects’ Noosa studio located just a few doors down, along a ridgetop road that winds through the picturesque Noosa Hinterland localities of Doonan and Tinbeerwah.
The house appears to nestle into the surrounding hillside and affords views of the Noosa coastline.
Image:
Christopher Frederick Jones
Simone and David’s functional brief for the Sunrise Studio called for self-contained, discrete accommodation for their daughter and grandson on their ecologically regenerated 5,720-square-metre site. This translated to a house that is a model for compact, sustainable living in Queensland’s subtropical environments. It has two bedrooms, a two-way bathroom, a kitchen, a living room, a dining room and a deck, all within a total floor area of 110 square metres. The location of the building on the site defers to the prospect of the existing dwelling, prioritizes the retention of all the existing, mature trees, and is oriented to maximize northern light and cooling breezes. The secluded studio is diagonally offset from the main house and carefully nestled back into the steep terrain. This arrangement amplifies the enveloping experience of the stunning landscape. The spatial dexterity of the plan and section elevate the efficiency of the program. The neatly square floor plan is pierced right through the middle with a vertical well that connects earth to sky and, from here, the roof planes tilt up to frame the views out to the Noosa coastline. These moves generate a spatial generosity and transparency that belies the modest size of the individual rooms. Drawing on the lessons of international modernism and the local experiments of Gabriel (and his circle), the modular structure is generated from a taut three-by-three-metre grid that prioritizes construction and material efficiency and presents as a contemporary prototype for lightweight prefabricated houses.
The architectural approach deployed by Bark Architects at the Sunrise Studio deftly uses siting, space and structure to elevate the experience of daily life – from yoga on the deck in the very early morning to relaxing by the fire listening to music in the evening. The care, comprehensiveness and continuity of this general practice has yielded a great little building with a compelling narrative that gives voice to the unique architecture of this part of the world.
