This home was designed for a design-loving couple and their sport-enthusiastic children. As owners of a successful landscaping business, it was essential that the architecture and gardens be conceived as one unified environment. The result is a home where indoor and outdoor spaces weave seamlessly together, creating a lived experience that continually connects the family to nature.

The clients sought a modest, enduring home for their growing family, one that would support both connection and retreat as their children move into adolescence. To achieve this, the house steps gradually down the site and is arranged around a series of courtyards, offering moments of shared gathering alongside carefully considered sanctuary spaces.

A central courtyard forms the heart of the design, optimising solar access while drawing daylight deep into the plan. Despite its location on a main road, the home presents a quiet and unambiguous mid-century Australian façade. Upon entry, the house reveals a dramatic shift. Garden terraces unfold, tiered courtyards appear, and a sunken lounge offers protected views through eye-level windows that shield the interior from the street.

The parents’ retreat sits upstairs among the treetops, providing privacy while maintaining a visual connection to the children’s areas below. Throughout the home, passive design principles underpin both the layout and the building envelope, enabling the capability to operate off-grid.

Materially, the home is grounded by deep walnut joinery, custom furniture pieces, and bold colour-blocked rooms that enrich the atmosphere and reinforce a sense of identity in each space. Every design decision, from the structure to the planting, works in harmony to create a family home where landscape and architecture are inseparable.