Stumpy Gully House

Stumpy Gully House begins from a question about how to build in a place that is quietly being eroded by its own popularity. Sited in the coastal hamlet of Balnarring, on the Mornington Peninsula and on unceded Boon Wurrung Country, the house responds to a street where newer dwellings sit full-width with minimum setbacks, presenting double garages to the road. Against that pattern the project — a collaboration between Stavrias Architecture and markowitzdesign, led by Adam Markowitz — proposes something closer to the older grain of Balnarring: a bushy frontage that holds the house back from the street and lets landscape, rather than parking, define the public face.

The plan is linear, and that decision does most of the work. Rather than opening to a conventional western back yard, the house turns its full length along the northern side boundary, so that every key space looks onto a single landscaped run that the architects describe as the big Australian side yard rather than the big back yard. This linear garden, designed by Jo Ferguson, threads past the living spaces and ties them together. The succession of rooms flows out into it through a northern glazed wall, while perpendicular timber-lined walls slip through that glazing to act as privacy baffles, ordering the space both inside and out without resorting to corridors.

Entry is placed at the midpoint of the house rather than at a front door, delivering you centrally to the living space and dispensing with long internal passages. The arrival point looks south through a large window onto a cool courtyard before drawing you north into the central living room, which opens completely to the garden through large stacking timber doors in warmer months. The kitchen's southern courtyard offers a summer respite, served by a custom steel-plate breakfast bar through a servery window. Westward, the children's corridor widens into a rumpus space lit from the north, fitted with joinery that carries a television and a cork display wall, a linear daybed and desk, and roll-away toy boxes. At the opposite eastern end, the parents' room and its ensuite — the latter with a Japanese onsen-style timber bath — face a private garden screened by the same baffle walls.

Material is handled as continuity between outside and in. External cedar cladding is pulled through the glazed wall to define the baffle walls on the interior, so the flow from exterior to interior reads as a single move. Dark-stained Victorian Blackbutt marks the structural hardwoods against lighter painted tones, and pebbledash render on the exterior, drawing on Japanese and Arts and Crafts references. Warm Victorian Blackwood runs through the kitchen joinery and custom furniture, set against recycled Victorian Blackbutt; a palette of eucalypt greens and warm whites holds the living spaces together, turning playful with terrazzo and colour in the family bathroom and subdued with brass and earthy greys in the ensuite.

Craft is integral to both design and construction. Door hardware, picture rails and furniture were custom-designed and made in collaboration between architect and craftspeople — among them a butcher's-block island bench of solid Blackwood, built from more than a thousand end-grain blocks glued together and carried on contrasting Blackbutt legs, and hand-carved door handles 2.4 metres high. Several of Markowitz's own pieces are integrated into the house, including the Flea Chairs and Fred Table in the dining room and the Plane Bed, first designed for Peter Stutchbury's Cabbage Tree House, here given a custom headboard and bedside table.

What Stumpy Gully House finally argues is that sensitivity to a changing village need not mean nostalgia. By orienting the whole house to the north along its side, holding a planted edge to the street, and binding interior and garden through a disciplined set of timber walls, it offers a model for development that is considerate of frontage, form and passive solar logic at once. The project was recognised as winner of Residential New over $1m at the 2023 ArchiTeam Awards.