The heritage Manly re-design that all started with surfboard storage

A building contractor working on a Manly house, owned by an interior designer who knows exactly what she wants, knew exactly the architects she needed to design a carport behind her family’s three level, semi-detached Federation home.

She needed Peter Ahern and Kurt Crisp, the double act from Buck and Simple whose website tag-line “doers of stuff” goes some way to explaining their craft-heavy design ethos.

“We appreciate craft,” says Ahern. “It’s what we pride ourselves on. And we think people are coming back to things with a hand-made nature, especially in their home environment.”

Yes. But a carport as a commission on a state heritage-listed house? Actually, Crisp confesses, “we were initially brought in to design a surfboard shed. Storing 30 surfboards was a problem.”

Now an almost invisible component in what evolved into a wholesale re-landscaping, decking and carport building exercise that steps up to the partially sandstone-walled new garaging, the 5.6-metre long by 1.6-metre wide surfboard storage is faced in horizontal teak boards. 

When closed, the garaging is just a panel in a timber wall beside the teak steps that lead sandy feet up from a side lane to an outdoor shower room.

The planter box the structure supports further disguises its function.

“After we’d finished that,” says Crisp, “we said, ‘next problem?’ “

That was the carport which is now a black-stained, cedar-clad, teak-trimmed installation on another back lane.

From the house it is the last set piece above the existing pool with the fish-tank end glass window. All the vertical sandstone walling shows off the art of the stonemason, “who was on site the longest”, according to Ahern.

But with its tapered ceiling beams, deep-framed entry and teak window box portal being so overt, the story of the showmanship artisanal skills is always forefront in the big picture.

And what’s an open window box when it’s not just a frame around the view back towards the house? “The massive reveal,” Crisp says, “is a place where skateboards can be fixed.”

With such focus on pleasing composition, skilled handiwork – “look at the way the timber is cut around the sandstone”, he continues, “and that everything the hand touches is teak, it all becomes a layering of teak over stone”.

The Buck and Simple boys are quick to emphasise the guiding ideas of the interior designer owner “who had such appreciation of design and such a relaxed nature that it became a real fun project”.

“She had,” say these doers of stuff, “such a crystalline vision of a Scandi-coastal outcome that it was a beautiful process for all of us”.

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