Water views predominate in Melbourne home nowhere near the waterfront

The new house builder Steve McSweeney built for his family in Melbourne’s bayside is some way from the beach. Yet many of its rooms have absolute waterfront positioning.

You glimpse aqua water from the entry, in the living room/kitchen; it laps the window threshold of the master suite and in its most novel situation it makes the 3.5-metre-long picture window in the basement recreation room an extraordinary installation of wavering light and sometimes human aqueous movement.

The three-level home designed by Steve Domoney and representing “probably the 25th house we have done together”, the architect says of his long partnership with McSweeney’s Belair Builders, is all blocky geometries arranged around a pool that intrudes into the geography of the house at the centrally located spa.

“The water is the first thing your eye is drawn towards.”

The four-bedroom house presents to the street a strong composition of grey planes tiled in a brick-like Japanese ceramic and extending white-rendered horizontal forms from what Domoney describes as “a quite heavy podium, solid and private. But above it soars a light roof canopy.”

Few of the walls actually meet the ground and none meet the ceilings. Clerestory windows fill the gap with daylight. “Everything above the podium is glass,” he says, “and it all accentuates the lightness of that roof hovering on top.”

That the roof kicks up fore and aft is, the architect explains matter of factly, “because it looks good. It lends a bit of playfulness to it.”

Playful, too, is the timber bridge that crosses the atrium to link the upstairs children’s bedrooms and rumpus space with the guest suite. “The catwalk reinforces the airiness of the house and so that you are not confined by corridors.”

“In order to provide that sense of seamless space” there are no corridors. But there is more whimsy delivered as a constant discovery of kinetic light-play waving either through tree branches or bamboo stalks, or reflecting off riffling water.

Down in the rec room (where there is an actual pool table), the north-side water window is the only natural light source “so that the rec space and bar is not a place of doom and gloom”, says Domoney.

“The light that filters through the water is so soft and so blue. And you should see it at night when the pool lights are on. You get amazing shadows and movement across the ceiling.

“We do pools as part of a house quite a lot because in the way it works for the atmosphere of houses like this, it is gold.”