This is a house completed this year for an elderly couple and their family in a valley in the dunes behind Australia’s longest beach – the 194 km Coorong Beach, fronting the Great Australian Bight. The house and external deck are elevated 900mm above the sand for views and to reduce the ingress of sand inside; a 12-metre ramp gets everyone up to it.
There were no services to the site, so the house catches its own water, and catches and stores its own solar power. (It has 60,000 litres of water when tanks are full, solar collectors which peak at 13 kilowatts when the sun is high and 27 kilowatt-hours of power storage. Water is heated in a solar panel, and boosted by solar power.) 700 metres from breaking surf, it has a salt interceptor, which ensures cyclic salt blown onto the roof doesn’t get into the rainwater storage. The house has reverse-cycle air conditioning for heating and cooling, and a slow-combustion stove for prolonged periods of cold weather.
The site is prone to strong southerly winds, so sealing of the walls, floor and roof is critical. External living areas are on the north and west sides, protected by the house itself. A curious feature of the construction was the imperative for deep-piered footings – the site has many wombat burrows and there is a real risk that these strong and industrious animals can undermine a building which doesn’t found itself deep.
Bushfires started locally by lightning are possible, so the house has a sprinkler system powered by a diesel pump, activated by an Embarr automatic control: when an electric ‘eye’ on the roof observes a particular band of ultra-violet radiation only generated by flame, it starts the pump and sprinklers. It checks every thirty seconds; if the flame has gone, it will switch off the sprinklers. (And it really works!)