Shore patrol: This beach house explores traditional vernacular means of tempering climate.

This latest in a series of elegant, minimal, object houses by Sean Godsell is a further speculation on the potential of an Australian vernacular that relates more explicitly to Asian regionalism than European historicism. Spare of form and clad in gridded skin of industrial grating, it has clear echoes of previous Godsell projects, such as the Kew House, the Carter Tucker House (AR Dec 2000) and the Peninsula House (AR Dec 2002), in which simple Miesian volumes are wrapped in a light and heat diffusing layer of slatted timber or metal.

Here, the brief is for a weekend house on a beachfront site, which might suggest a sybaritic vision of lotus-eating excess and a commensurately indulgent architectural response. However, the clients, a couple with children, wanted a simpler, heartier experience that reconnected them with nature and the elements beyond the climate controlled confines of office and home life in the city.

Set on St Andrew's Beach on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, the site is immediately privileged, being one of the few locations in Australia where construction is permitted directly on the foreshore. The elevated site commands ocean views and though hot in summer, the winter climate is often harsh, with gale force winds. The bar-like volume of the building is hoisted up on steel pilotis, adding to the sense of elevation and transforming the house into a vantage point from which to survey its surroundings. The undercroft is deployed as a car port and storage area. Lifted clear of the dense vegetation, the elongated box appears to hover lightly above the ground, its mass further softened by a skin of rusted metal mesh that enfolds the two long sides like a rough veil. More prosaically, the cladding is actually floor grating made from oxidised steel, a tough, cheap industrial product creatively appropriated for the project. In places the gridded metal sheets hinge open to form brises soleil.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Organisation is admirably economical. Rooms are simply butted together in a long line and linked by a looping promenade deck. A communal living, dining and kitchen space is placed at the prow of the block, with three bedrooms and a study to the rear. Depending on the time of year, sliding glass doors connect individual rooms with the promenade deck or seal them off from it, but to move around the house always involves traversing this interstitial space, which subtly blurs the boundary between interior and exterior realms.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The house updates and reinterprets traditional Australian responses to climate moderation. Elements of the outback homestead--the sunroom, the breezeway and the sleep-out--are re-organised into an abstract verandah which shelters and protects the occupants while enhancing the fluidity of the loosely defined spaces. The external environment is filtered and modulated through a series of layers so while harsh extremes are tempered, occupants are always aware of the elemental dynamics of light, climate and nature. C.S.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]