Designed by Dunn and Hill Architects, Whale Watching House is a single-family house with a beautiful ocean view.
Description by Dunn and Hill Architects: The Whale Watching House is a re-working of a three bedroom fibro house, which sat on a point of land opposite a whale watching platform. It looked over the ocean but yet seemed to be uninterested in the sea or the passing whales.
The house while well built and efficiently planned it needed improvements to the sustainability, energy use and comfort, to expand to take a family of 6 and to address both the good and bad of the location out on the point (good; the horizon, the light, the smells of the sea, the view of the incoming storm. bad; the wind, the wind, the wind).
The Whale Watching House has been designed with the needs of a wheelchair in mind, but no less has it been designed for teenagers, or for parents of teenagers, or for deckchairs, sand, wet towels, mosquitoes and barbecues, or with thought given to our finite resources. It plays carefully and thoughtfully with the paired ideas of shelter / privacy and view / exposure.
It is a house recycled and brought from the 1950’s into today and it’s new form should see it providing shelter well into the future.
Architects: Dunn and Hillam Architects
Project: Whale Watching House
Photographs: Killian O’Sullivan
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