PHOTO: Permanent camping in the Mona Vale dunes won Peter Stutchbury a joint Houses New award. Photo: Michael Nicholson
The award most of our top-ranked architects covet in the annual peak national architectural competition is for the best new house. It’s named for the giant of the Australian lineage, Robin Boyd.
And, Boyd would undoubtedly approve the projects authored by the joint winners of the Houses New accolade this year.
Both are acknowledged masters, and both have designed homes that accord with Boyd’s philosophy in being functional, unfussy but fabulously responsive to their context.
Sited in the primary dunes above Mona Vale’s part of the Pacific coast, Peter Stutchbury Architecture’s copper-roofed Basin Beach House has a draped apex form that the jury of the Australian Institute of Architects National Awards compared to “a low slung tent”.
Splayed and anchored by solid buttresses of concrete, the interiors are simple but “meticulous” said the jury, adding that the “raw, elemental” building by an architect who likes things that way, “is a mastery of understatement, elegance and of delight”.
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