Hawley
A Forever Home at Hawley Beach on the north-west coast, designed with Green Design.
The brief
A home the owners will eventually live in full-time — used as a holiday house in the meantime, minutes from the beach.
That dual life is the interesting constraint. A holiday house and a forever home are usually built to different standards: one is forgiven for being a bit rough and a bit cold, the other is not. When the same building has to be both, it has to be built to the higher one from the start.
The build
The part people underestimate is what happens while nobody is there.
A house used intermittently spends weeks closed up, unheated and unwatched. That is the ideal environment for condensation and mould, and it is why so many Tasmanian holiday houses smell musty on arrival and grow black spots in the wardrobes. The answer is not a dehumidifier — it is an airtight, continuously insulated envelope with controlled ventilation, which keeps the interior dry and stable on very little energy whether anyone is home or not. Built that way, the house is ready to be comfortable within an hour of arrival instead of a day.
Hawley Beach adds coastal exposure to the brief. Salt reaches fixings, flashings and coatings well inland on this coast, so marine-grade selection is the baseline; wind off Bass Strait feeds into structure and glazing specification.
Doing all of that now, rather than retrofitting when the owners move in permanently, is the cheaper path by a wide margin. Insulation, airtightness and glazing are the things you cannot sensibly come back and add.
The result
A coastal home that holds up to being left alone — and is already the house they will retire into.
See our north-west coast work and Port Sorell. Photography by Tassie Visuals.
