NIII
A high-end family home in Launceston built around entertaining and sport, designed with Allure Design.
The brief
Owners who host — and who wanted recreation on the property rather than somewhere to drive to. A full tennis court on site, and a home organised so that entertaining is what the house is for, not something it tolerates.
That is a rarer brief than it sounds. Most large homes are ordinary plans scaled up, with a big table dropped into the living room. This one had to work with numbers in it.
The build
Entertaining is a circulation problem. When twenty people are in a house the failures are always the same three: a kitchen that becomes a bottleneck, one route between inside and out, and a bathroom nobody can reach without crossing a conversation. Solving it means deciding early where people will stand — at the island, at the threshold, near the drinks — and building the plan around those positions rather than around furniture.
The inside-outside transition carries most of the weight. If it is a single door, the party splits in two and half of it ends up in a corridor. Getting it right is glazing, level thresholds and covered space that works in a Launceston shoulder season, not just in February.
A tennis court is a civil job before it is a sporting one. It needs a genuinely flat, properly drained, well-compacted platform — which on any Tasmanian block means cut, fill, retaining and subsurface drainage designed rather than assumed. Court orientation matters too: get it wrong and the low sun makes half the day unplayable. It is site engineering, and it is priced at feasibility alongside the house rather than treated as landscaping to sort out later.
Then it has to hold up. A house that hosts takes more wear in a year than most take in five — which drives finish selection, joinery construction and the hardware nobody notices until it fails.
The result
A home that does what it was built to do, at scale, and a court that plays properly.
See more Launceston work, our luxury home building, or the portfolio. Photography by Tassie Visuals.
