Built from shingles cut from old apple crates, discarded limbs from local pine trees and corrugated iron, the Shearers Quarters building on Tasmania’s Bruny Island is a game-changer for architect John Wardle and his family.
Situated on a paddock overlooking Storm Bay, this modest building takes its cues from local history, the rugged terrain and the shape of the landscape. Beyond the horizon of Storm Bay is Antartica.
Before designing the award-winning project, Melbourne-based architect John and his wife Susan spent 10 years travelling back and forth each month between Melbourne and Bruny Island, gaining an intimate knowledge of their working sheep property and the social history of the area.
The idea of a village of structures, which includes building a big studio barn is probably how the whole project will end up. We’re aiming to restore the old house back to its original condition, taking it back to its original form.
‘We had originally planned to fully restore the old house, and extend it quite substantially, and gained a planning permit to do so,’ John Wardle says. ‘Then we really thought about it. We shared the [old] house with pretty much everybody: our family, friends, and shearers, and we thought the restoration would take over a year and a half, realising then that we would have nowhere to live in that time.’
‘Susan asked the question, “why don’t we build a shearers quarters?”, so they can have that in the long-term, and we can use it as our temporary accommodation while we restore the old house.
‘As things happen, our ambitions rose steadily throughout the project and what started as a humble little place for shearers and friends became a much more intensive affair.’
Researching their 440-hectare property’s history, Wardle found ‘an old blurry photo’ that placed the original shearing shed next to the 1840s house. Then, while scoring away the ground on the site, they discovered the old footings and the old brick sheep yards. Referencing an old photograph, the Wardles speculated on the nature of that shed, which set in train the idea of building the shearers quarters there, so that it would be ‘in conversation with the old cottage’.
The design was an experiment in new ways of living and creating space.
‘A lot of the conceptual work was to make it as small as possible,’ Wardle says. ‘I just kept whittling it down and down and down until the spaces seemed right, and about as small as plausible for what we wanted it to be.’ The building contains three small bedrooms—one of those a bunk room—and an open-plan living room with kitchen. This, along with the significant outside north-facing living area, makes the complex 130m². In the outdoor space, the family can cook using the outdoor fire, eat and entertain.
The challenge with a small house, Wardle says, is to look at the absolute efficiency of the space.
‘It’s a constant exercise of the way spaces can operate,’ he says. ‘Spaces can have multi-purposes such as our kitchen, dining room and living room. The space has to also conduct itself for various settings from shearers to large groups, and it should feel intimate when there is just Susan and myself—maybe with a couple of our kids.’
Being both client and architect allowed Wardle to take his time and work with the process in a way not often possible due to time and money restraints. His firm, the Melbourne-based John Wardle Architects, is currently finishing work on the $120 million architecture building for Melbourne University, a contract that has required working fast and within tight public-building budgets.
‘So as our own client, it allowed a slow process and a remarkable builder [Cordwell Lane] allowed a level of engagement that gave some flexibility,’ Wardle says.
As you arrive down the 1.5km winding dirt driveway, the building looks at its most rudimentary, with only its corrugated tin roof and a section of the wall visible. It’s only as you turn the corner that you see the end profile of the house. It unfolds as you approach, with the long roof holding your attention and securing the line of the landscape the building sits in.
Entering the quarters through the north facing front door, you are immediately in the large room that houses the wood and stainless steel galley kitchen, the dining room table, and the living room. On one of these walls sits the fireplace and a library that houses an eclectic collection of books old and new. Wardle’s mother was a librarian and this library is a salute to her. Around the house historical trinkets collected by his father are put to new use, and items Wardle himself has found at local markets—things like teapots and cooking bowls—sit in the kitchen. Specially commissioned pottery plates and bowls, fired from the minerals in the soil of the farm, are used daily.
The large, carefully framed windows in the living area are designed to capture the views across Storm Bay and back over the property. Standing in front of these windows, you feel so connected with the landscape, almost part of it. This is what Wardle was aiming for. From the corner of your eye you catch the current shearing shed, built in the 1960s, on a nearby hill, reminding you that this is a working farm with sheep that need shearing and land that needs constant care.
‘The views are all part of the equation,’ Wardle says. ‘The house slid back and forth many times on plan. Even when we first got down on site and the bulldozer was here levelling one small corner, just at the last moment we slid the house back about another six or so metres and that was partly to get these views in the right position.’
The quality of materials and the skills of the local craftsmen, from the steel fabricators who installed the fireplace, to the carpenters and builders, allowed this remarkable building to come to life as constant adjustments were made along the way.
Locally sourced
The building is made from wood, glass, and corrugated iron. The wood—primarily from Bruny Island and the Tasmanian mainland—is recycled from apple packing, and the local pine, Pinus macrocarpa, sturdy trees used as windbreaks throughout much of southern Australia. These trees usually last about 100 years before falling over or losing limbs.
‘We had a problem getting enough of the Pinus macrocarpa, [so] it’s from about nine different suppliers, generally local farmers or small timber millers,’ Wardle says. This wood lines most of the building’s interior walls.
The shingles lining the bedrooms were made from old apple packing cases; leftovers from the apple industry in Tasmania, which collapsed in the 1970s when England joined the European Economic Community. These remarkable boxes were made out of 3mm timber, so when full of apples and on ships to England, they would would flex to avoid bruising the fruit.
As well as sheep, Wardle’s property once featured a commercial orchard and an old shed was used to pack apples for export. While researching the history of the apple industry in the Huon Valley and on Bruny Island, he visited many old sheds in the district and found them full of old box makers, apple graders, labels and labelling machines.
‘So many of these sheds had these large piles or packs of timber, all cut and ready to make the next day’s boxes, and they were just sitting there. I started to think there must be some purpose for those boxes other than kindling, which is what it has been—and I got the idea of using it to line all of the cross walls, I realised the opportunity to form a shingle pattern.’
Each bedroom has shingles made from blue gum or Tasmanian myrtle, depending on the region where the crates were made.
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One third of the property is now a private forest, part of Tasmania’s forest reserve program. This means this land is a sanctuary and nothing can be moved, not even limbs from trees. The area houses two rare birds, the forty-spotted pardalote, which lives permanently on the land, and the swift parrot, which migrates between Tasmania and the east coast of Victoria and NSW. Adding to this, Wardle’s family and staff from his firm have planted more than 8,000 trees in an effort to make the property completely sustainable.
Now, the family is circling back to the original idea of restoring of the old 1840s house, and then adding a barn to establish a small village of buildings.
‘The feeling was that it [the old 1840s house] was always this lonely little single house on the peninsula and now it’s not that, so it needs to go somewhere else,’ Wardle says. ‘The idea of a village of structures, which includes building a big studio barn, is probably how the whole project will end up. We’re aiming to restore the old house back to its original condition, taking it back to its original form.’
The Shearers Quarters Bruny Island has won a number of major awards for architecture. These include the 2012 Robin Boyd Award for Residential Architecture—House [Australian Institute of Architects]; Winner, Australian ‘Villa’ Project of the Year 2012, World Architecture Festival, Singapore; 2012 Winner, House of the Year, HOUSES Award.
By Design looks at the places and things we imagine, build, use and occupy, explaining how creative ideas take tangible form through the design process.