Text via Harley Graham Architects
Gull House home was designed to offer privacy and to capture the incredible surrounding sunrise, sunset, mountain, and ocean views. The structure of the home floats which literally captures the client’s brief for a home that was light and uplifting.
In the initial design phase, it was conceived as a ‘seagull’ floating above a timber platform. Noticing the birds that flew over the site each day, the team at Harley Graham Architects started discussing the similarities between the hovering or floating forms of architecture and the way seagulls hover.
A major factor in the design of the house was privacy from the many surrounding houses. Despite being in a dense neighbourhood, the house uses solid balconies and screens to create the feeling of a hidden sanctuary. Open living rooms on each level flow to private outdoor living and pool areas. Large decks create ample areas for outdoor living, dining, entertaining and relaxing by the firepit.
The different forms of the house connect with a combination of natural hardwood and fibre cement cladding. Complex shapes hover in the air and slowly stagger down the hill. External materials move from outside to inside.
The house has a lot of hardwood timber throughout. Blackbutt internal flooring, Spotted Gum External Decking and cladding cover over half of the house. The natural hardwoods give the house its warmth, its contrast, and anchor it to the site.
There are many sustainable features employed throughout the home. There is no air-conditioning, surprising for the hot Australian summers and temperatures which are warm for nine months of the year. Instead, the home takes advantage of natural ventilation.
New lighting and flooring throughout helped create a unified tablet for an eclectic mix of new and vintage It runs on a five-kilowatt solar system with battery back up. Roof water is recycled into two 10,000 litre tanks and then filtered and fed back to the house and then is used for all water throughout, including drinking water and toilet flushing.
The house adds to the fabric of old and new beach houses in a densely populated knoll in the middle of Byron Bay. It was part of a two-house development encouraging a form of residential density in the middle of coastal towns that is necessary to avoid sprawl on the edges of communities.
Gull House manages the best of both worlds – a prime location and a hidden retreat all in one.
