The Futuro has landed: How a space-age pod became a massage-therapy room at an eco-luxe retreat

A construction that is a definitive built expression of the space age is one of the small project contestants in this year’s South Australian chapter architecture awards, to be announced next Thursday.

Max Pritchard Gunner Architects entered it but didn’t design the Futuro. Rather, one of Adelaide’s renowned practices refurbished the eight-metre pod as a therapy room adjunct to the eco lodge, Naiko Retreat at the tip of the Fleurieu Peninsula.

Max Pritchard did design the wave-form, three-bedroom, off-grid, super getaway ($1275 a weekend night) that looks out from the land’s edge towards Kangaroo Island.

Completed in 2019, it gained an awards commendation that same year.

Pritchard explains his involvement with the fascinating objet d’architecture, saying that when he and Tony Johnson, owner of the 800-hectare sheep-grazing property, were scoping the perfect site for the eco-luxe getaway, he noted the presence of the little spacecraft on a neighbouring plot above a small sandy cove.

It wasn’t the first time he’d seen this ellipsoidal structure, one of a job lot of 100 originally created as small-scale portable snowfield accommodation by the Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in the late 1960s. Some 60 still remain around the globe. Two are in Australia.

It was in his final year of architecture studies, “when we were very excited about all sorts of wild modular and prefabricated architecture” that this particular Futuro had landed in SA. It was imported by a developer and set up on a vacant block on a North Adelaide shopping street.

“I remember when I saw it, I liked it but thought, what’s that for?”

By the early 1970s, it had disappeared from view, migrating to the supremely private cove at Deep Creek to be used for decades as a diminutive holiday house that must have given a few passing sailors a surprise.

Wanting to secure the beach for the new resort, the Johnsons purchased the beach block but found the spacecraft was derelict. “It had mouldy carpet and broken windows.” Pritchard argued it should be saved as a resort attraction.

“Let’s find a use for it,” he told Johnson. “Let’s make it something unique.

“We rightly thought it was a nice space that was good for the use we found for it.”

Massage therapy does not concentrate on views, which was fortuitous because, as the architect says, “the little portholes were good for snowfields but not the sort of outlooks Australians are used to”.

In such a corrosive environment and although the steel struts needed restoration and the windows replaced, Pritchard says the Futuro had fared reasonably well considering its white skin is “fibreglass reinforced polyester – whatever that is?”

In refitting the Deep Creek pod, the veteran architect made a new floor and rising sides “of plywood and battens to emphasise the radial structure”. He explains it was always plumbed for water and sewage and currently has a sink, shower, toilet and basin.

As in scores of space movies, entry is via stairs incorporated in “a hatch, like an aeroplane, that clips up to become part of the structure”.

For Max Pritchard Gunner Architects, which has an outstandingly broad portfolio of individualistic residential work and is currently in the process of redesigning the world-famous Southern Ocean Lodge that burned down in the 2020 Kangaroo Island fires, the Futuro project is one right out of left field.

“It’s the project that takes the cake,” he says.

www.mpgarchitects.com.au