Treehouse designed to dissolve into the landscape

This home known as the “Tree house” is perched on a steep forested hillside above the Great Ocean Road and Bass Strait in Victoria. In designing the Tree house, architects Jackson Clements Burrows drew on the modest local vernacular of 1950’s painted fibro shacks, by using cement sheets with expressed batten joints to dissolve the house into the surrounding landscape. The 2 tone green colour scheme used for the exterior helped to merge the building with the vegetation on the hillside on which it sits. The vertical timber battens on the building are a naturally stained timber, which will silver over time like the branches and trunks of trees in the bush surrounds. The changing light and colours throughout the day further engage the home with its bushland context.

[photography by John Gollings]