Light filter: This house, dug into the side of a sand dune in victoria, elegantly makes the case for a new kind of Australian culture that blends Asian and European strands.

Sean Godsell's latest house is dug into the side of a sand dune on a beach south of Melbourne. Like the Carter/Tucker house, which was highly commended in ar+d awards 2000 (AR December 2000), it is an apparently simple exercise in wood and light, sun and sea. But it is made with even more subtlety and detailed care than its predecessor.

The brief of the Peninsula House was simple: the owners wanted a living room including a kitchen and dining space, a sleeping place and a library. A verandah, essential to middle-class Australian life, was required on the north (sun-facing) front. Each space is different, each has its own atmosphere.

Godsell decided to articulate the elements clearly within an overall rectilinear form. You come in to the car port at the top of the slope and go down a staircase that leads to the main (living room) floor. Here, a deck extends to the east, open to the main volume of the house though a shuttered wall, which can be raised to make a portico that gradually and subtly allows interior and exterior to flow together with many careful gradations of experience.

Slung over half of the living area is the bedroom, a secret space reached by a separate private stair. It looks out calmly over the living room towards the sea, and is on top of the library at the back of the plan: a calm, quiet space dug into the side of the dune. So the house evokes all the archetypal qualities of dwelling: cave, hut, hearth - enclosure, expansion, and conquest of but respect for nature.

Light is orchestrated with great care. The rectangular plan is created with oxidized steel portal frames. There are two skins, the inner one of glass and steel, the outer one of recycled jarrah slats. How envious architects of the northern hemisphere are of the relative cheapness of Australian hardwood, which allows such slender sections. How well Godsell has used the potential, so the house changes as you move round it from being almost opaque to virtually transparent. Each material is handled with great care and attention to its essential properties. Each calmly modulates space, making the whole house into a gigantic sundial that records the passage of time by the patterns of shadows thrown by the screens. Godsell discusses the fusion of cultures which he hopes that the house represents. The mix of archetypes: Japanese (space within space), European (kindly living room and cave-like study) and Anglo-Indian (verandah) is a remarkable and moving tribute to evolving and exciting Australian culture.

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Sean Godsell, Melbourne

Project team

Sean Godsel, Hayley Franklin

Structural engineer

Fellcettl Pty Led

Landscape archltects

Sean Godsell with Sam Cox

Photography

Earl Carter