Captains Quarters
A Forever Home under construction on Bruny Island, designed with Draft One.
The brief
A home that earns its place on a remote island site — and that can be left alone for stretches without the damp, musty decline that catches out so many coastal Tasmanian houses.
The build
Bruny is the logistics problem before it is a building problem. Every trade, every truck and every delivery crosses on the ferry, on a timetable. That single fact reshapes a programme: materials go in fewer, larger consignments; trades are scheduled as full island days rather than by the hour; and a small buffer of consumables lives on site, because a forgotten box of fixings is not a ten-minute problem here.
Island sites also tend to bring their own services. Power, water and wastewater are rarely a matter of connecting to something — they are solutions to be designed, and costed honestly at feasibility stage rather than discovered later.
Exposure does the rest. Salt and wind drive fixings, flashings and glazing specification, and a well-sealed, continuously insulated envelope stops being a comfort upgrade and becomes the thing that keeps the house dry through the months nobody is in it.
The result
Under construction now. Follow it on the under construction page.
See the sister project Lunalon, also on Bruny, or read how we approach building on Bruny Island. Photography by Mike Durek.