Merricks Beach House

The Peninsula Township of Merricks Beach; gravel roads, manna gums and the quintessential ‘Beach Shack’; fibro clad, skillion roof, eve gutters and the corrugated rain water tank.

The Merricks Beach House inherits it all, understated, atypically local; a coastal Victorian, ‘born and bred’.  The vernacular is placed at the centre of our attention; a dislocation is manifest, an aim to create a sense of the familiar / unfamiliar, a second glance, a glitch.

At the rear of the site a grove of twisted tea tree once stood. Once again the trees are rendered visible, embedded within the polycarbonate wall cavity, ghosted, as though growing with the bedrooms. 

The mismatch of the beach house is celebrated internally, rooms like walking into a sepia photograph, wall colours as if cigarette stained, wall paper patterned like grand-pas brown stripped pyjamas, furniture recycled from existing cabinets and wardrobes, a 50’s kitchen of pastel colours and loud laminex, bathrooms with bright vinyl floors and drop in shower bases, bedrooms adorned in faded 60s wall paper, 70s Acrylic dome lights and chocolate brown carpets.