On a 50-acre hilltop on the Mornington Peninsula in Australia, Michael Lumby Architecture and Nielsen Jenkins complete Merricks Farmhouse, a house organised around a single sheltered courtyard.
The site is a fifty-acre hilltop in Merricks, paddocks and vineyards on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, with a long view across Phillip Island and Western Port Bay. The ridgeline delivers the views and the coastal weather in equal measure. The house, built for two permanent residents who expect four children and their families on holidays, is conceived as an abstraction of a typical Australian farmhouse, engineered to expand and contract around that rhythm.
The plan answers the exposure by turning inward. Spread over a single level, the program wraps a large, sheltered courtyard garden at its centre. "This courtyard becomes the most important room in the house, acting as a reference and refuge from the expansive nature of the outlook," the studio writes. The heft of the walls, deep eave overhangs, and dark ceiling finishes press the rooms toward this interior garden, so that once night falls the house folds onto its own reflected light. Three-quarters of the plan can be shut down; the front wing then works as a one-bedroom pavilion with an intimacy that belies the size of the whole.
A singular sweeping roof reads as one element in the landscape; the walls beneath it are treated as more elemental. A metre thick and planted on top, they project into the paddocks to edit views and choreograph approach, and where the rooms turn private they curl back to enclose further interior courtyards. The palette is narrow and specific: board-formed concrete with its circular tie-holes left exposed, a dark-stained timber soffit dropped low, cognac leather banquettes in a sunken lounge, and a kitchen lifted into a double-pitched timber ceiling around a monolithic white-concrete island.
Trees decide the circulation. The old driveway avenue of Elms is kept as the main pedestrian entry, leading to a concrete portal that reads as a single gate in the paddock. North of the pool, a retained windbreak of lilly-pillies holds as a softer second courtyard, edged by a wall of trees. Every room looks onto a garden.
The most considered move is the water. With no council mains, the whole roof becomes a catchment, and storage takes the form of circular concrete tanks, the standard item of Australian farm infrastructure. The circle is carried through as a motif: a plunge pool ringed in rendered concrete, a firepit, birdbaths, a sequence of ponds along the covered walks. "The building acts simply as a lens from which to experience the landscape," the studio writes. The tank makes the point in reverse, pulling agricultural necessity into the vocabulary of the house.
The jury noticed. The project took the 2023 Australian House of the Year at the HOUSES Awards and the AIA National Award for Residential Houses. What holds, stripped of prizes, is the discipline: a large holiday house that refuses to behave like one, closing three-quarters of its plan into a wall when the rooms are not needed, and letting the courtyard, the Elms, and the Bay do the rest.
