Green Design: Beach House Beauty

By Author: Nina Carrozo
Total Articles: 39
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This beautifully designed courtyard home uses a simple plan and palette of materials to create a modern Australian beach house that's perfectly in touch with its older neighbours.

Chosen by Light Home Design Ambassador Carolyn McFarland as a great demonstration of a light home, Kurreki House is a courtyard housebuilt in a NSW-coastal fire zone.

McFarland loves the way Bourne Blue Architecture has created a modern home that's beautifully sympathetic to the old beach shacks that dot the surrounding community of Seal Rocks - typically fibre cement clad with timber battens. Kurreki House is a modern take on that and has used fibre cement sheet with aluminium battens - and both materials are non-combustible.

However it's the courtyard design that probably most captured McFarland's attention. It is a holiday house, she acknowledges, so that frees up the design a bit but she admires the economical use of materials and the efficiency of the plan.

"It's just really nicely built and they've used economical materials in a well put together way," she says. "You don't need to use expensive materials to get a ...
... really good looking house."

The courtyard design
The courtyard design puts all the rooms around the perimeter which McFarland says helps maximise light and ventilation in less space.

For example the bedrooms are just closed off from the courtyard with galvanised roller shutter doors.

"So you can just open up during the night, and sleep under mosquito nets - there are privacy issues, you aren't being overlooked by neighbours, you can see the sky and it really suits the relaxed, beach, Australian way of life," says McFarland.

In a suburban context, on a 400 square metre block, this courtyard plan is a way of presenting a face to the street but having real privacy inside.

Listen to the podcast and see the images here at Light Home. http://www.lighthome.com.au/_webapp_1561306/Design_Ambassador%27s_Choice_-_Kurreki_House]

Nina Carrozo is Client Service Manager with Light Home. Light Home is a website and bi-annual magazine that celebrates lightweight construction and light homes, because when they’re well designed, they’re perfectly suited to the way we love to live.

Design Ambassador's Choice- Kurreki House