How this couple created a forever house to live in through old age

Designed to the specific brief that the downsizing clients wanted new digs that would allow them to age in place – literally until they were “wheeled out” – the L-shaped house at Flinders, on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, should age with grace as well.

Of “modest materiality – it’s not flashy”, says Bower Architecture’s Chema Bould, the simplicity of its lines, an ever-present connection to the lovely garden composed by one of the state’s most eminent landscape architects, and the way the structure has been created to “drape down the site”, makes Coastal Court a very special project.

But this is architecture, not curtain-making, so what does Bould mean by “drape”?

On the large greenfield block they helped Michelle and Peter to select, Bower placed the timbered house on two perimeters as the privacy buffer for a green courtyard. And with the land descending diagonally by five metres, “the idea was ramping down or draping down the cross-fall”.

Ramping is the key concept because the long corridors in the two wings that are essentially one room wide have been made as polished concrete ramps and obviously are the strategy that avoids stairs.

Bower calls them “gallery spaces” and with oak-lined ceilings and limestone rendered walls that only come down to runs of low windows that see the garden, they are made expressively hand-touched and a little bit rough.

“We really wanted to celebrate imperfection – or what the Japanese call wabi-sabi – in all the materials. On every surface of the building”, says Bould, “we’ve embraced that concept”.

Externally, vertical silvertop ash timbering is left natural and unstained, except in the entry, which is a cove of contrast. “Dark and moody, so it has character”.

Internally, the light-dark story is evident in the joinery, particularly present in the kitchen where the granite bench is figured like a storm.

In the bathroom in the zoned main bedroom wing, which includes a serious study for Peter, the walls are in fabulously imperfect and “very earthy” silver travertine.

While Flinders has been a blue-chip retiree destination for decades, these clients were long-time locals who came in after 40 years living on a nearby farm that had views to Westernport. They can still get sea glimpses on the small deck at the top of the spiral stair.

But such a wrenching relocation made maximum privacy and a place to maintain a passion for gardening vital to the brief.

Beyond the arrangement of “making the house like a fence” and the structural angularity that traces the natural topography, the creation of a garden bought in a major contributor who, happily, is a friend of the couple.

Andrew Laidlaw runs his own design business and is a landscape architect who works with Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens. Like the house, his layout and plantings are a huge part of what makes Coastal Court, as Chema Bould knows it, “such a calm, enwrapping sanctuary.

“From the minute you open the front door, you feel like you are a million miles away”.

Returning to the pragmatic premise of the project, which is to keep the clients ambulant and in situ, at the end of the other wing of the house – past the garage – are two bedrooms, a bathroom and a small foyer with kitchenette appointments.

“This is future-proofing. The idea was that they could have someone live in the north wing because this gorgeous house is for them to stay in forever.”

bowerarchitecture.com.au