A Beach House at Balnarring

For my apprenticeship, I have to deconstruct and examine an existing house, and I have chosen the Isaacson/Davis Beach House at Balnarring (also called the Balnarring Beach House), by John Wardle Architects, which won the RAIA (Victoria) Architecture Medal for the design of the best building in the state.

It appealed to me above the other two designs because of its very human scale, its almost vernacular design concepts and its interesting details.

I chose this house because I love the idea of a beach house, and this one was created as a holiday space in every sense of the word. The house is modest in size, intended as a retreat, a place to relax. The architect describes the house as a place that can be "unpacked" on arrival and "repacked" on departure, as though the house itself reflects the joy of happily unpacking the tote bag, thrown in the back of the car for the weekend away (Ferguson n.d. 1).

A holiday home, in my opinion, is a place to forget the stresses of day to day life, to relax and regroup, and I feel that this house has fulfilled the reasons for its being, and I hope over the next few weeks, I can share these ideas and discoveries with you.