The Bevel
A hillside Forever Home in Launceston, designed with S.Group — and holder of HIA Tasmania’s Kitchen of the Year, $40,000–$60,000 for 2024.
The brief
A couple with a genuinely clear vision, and a large, difficult site to realise it on.
What they wanted was a private family home that took everything the hill had to offer without putting the family on display. The form does the work: the house spans out along the hilltop and is shaped to gather the morning sun as it comes up, then hold the daylight through the day — while turning a closed shoulder to the approach.
The build
Spanning a house out over a hilltop is an engineering commitment, and a large one. The structure has to carry loads out across ground that is falling away, footings go deeper and work harder than any flat block would require, and retaining becomes designed structure rather than a landscaping afterthought. On a site like this the engineering is not a line item — it is the reason the design is possible at all.
Shaping a building to the sun compounds it. Angles and bevels that let the form capture a low morning sun mean the geometry stops being rectangular, and once that happens every junction is a one-off. Setting out is unforgiving, standard details stop applying, and each connection has to be resolved rather than repeated. That work is invisible when it goes well and glaring when it does not.
The kitchen is where the same discipline surfaces somewhere people actually stand. Taking a state Kitchen of the Year title is not about the appliances — it is stone meeting joinery without a shadow line doing the apologising, and services roughed in months earlier landing exactly where the setout said they would.
The result
A private family home on the side of a hill that catches the sunrise and holds the light all day — and a kitchen judged the best in its class in the state.
See more Launceston work or our luxury home building. Photography by Tassie Visuals.
