Shared Custody—Groundskeeper’s Cottage on Regenerating Farm

On 100-odd hectares of Wathaurong Country just west of Geelong, an inscrutable, utilitarian, off-grid caravan-meetsshed-meets-field-science-hut designed by architects and academics Simone Koch and Peter Brew is garnering plenty of awards recognition and media interest. Partly that’s a response to a humble, high-performance dwelling conceived entirely in service of the site’s ecological regeneration. Partly it’s in recognition of the big ideas behind this little place, including the opportunities and obligations of architects and homeowners living and working on unceded Aboriginal land.

Simone and Peter bought the site pre-pandemic from sisters whose decades of land care had already restored swathes of a larger family sheep farm. It adjoined the Bannockburn Bush, a community-run nature reserve in a grassy woodlands corridor between Sandy Creek and Bruces Creek and comprised 50 hectares of grassy woodlands protected by a Trust for Nature covenant, remnant grasslands and invasive weeds including Disa bracteata (South African weed orchid), and a sheep run whose income was funding regeneration. “The owners were keen to pass it on to somebody who understood their vision for it,” Peter says.

The pair were new to regenerative land management, but relished the opportunity to learn in collaboration with their students and local community groups including the Geelong Landcare network (with whom they collaborate on grass seed collection) and the Wathaurong Aboriginal Cooperative (weeding and burning). As educators, Simone and Peter recognised an opportunity to honestly explore the complicity of architects and buyers in the ongoing dispossession of traditional custodians via the property market, and the power of private projects like this to bring together diverse First Nations and non-Aboriginal communities to regenerate ecologies.

Spring Creek Road Farm House has been shortlisted for the 2023 Premier’s Sustainability Award for Sustainable Places, and the Australian Institute of Architects’ 2023 Victorian and National Architecture Awards for Residential Houses – New Architecture. Presenting the project to the AIA, Simone and Peter were upfront about the challenging questions behind it. “We acknowledge the Elders on whose land we work, and … that the land is … ‘contested’, ‘unceded’ or ‘stolen’,” they said. “Is it then actually respect if once we say this we then continue to act as we have been for the last two centuries? Can an architect build or issue a contract on a property that it acknowledges as being in dispute? The title deed we now possess would have been given for little or no cost on the basis that the holder demonstrated ‘improvement’ of the land. Through the use of covenants and agreements on the site, we have effectively diminished its value in the models used by financial institutions. It is now worth less, and our program is to continue to diminish the area used for farming until there is no value in the property and the relationship with the land is simply that we care for it.”

The designers and their various collaborators have segued farm income from sheep to canola; dramatically reduced invasive orchids, pasture grasses and woody weeds; added a highperformance, off-grid, solar-powered house (and adjacent shed sheltering it from fierce southerlies); and begun regenerating more than half a hectare around the house via seeds collected and propagated on site.

Peter describes the utilitarian design as akin to a mock-up of a house. Simone says the brief amounted to comfortable spaces for refuge and rejuvenation, essential for the hard physical labour that makes this place tick. “We knew we needed to have respite from the weather regularly,” she says. “If you’re out there weeding you need to come in every couple of hours to sort of breathe life back into yourself.” Post-pandemic it has become home base for at least half their time.

The no-frills structure of recycled timber, clip-fixed zincalume steel roof, wide eaves and exposed flashing (sans the usual cladding) contains a highly insulated, “vacuum sealed” interior of similarly unadorned screw-fixed cement-sheet lining boards. It’s conceived as a continuous corridor of four six-by-four-metre spaces that fold into one another and out to the external deck like a not-quite-assembled cardboard box. One space houses the kitchen, bathroom, utility and breakfast area; one the entry, sitting area and library tucked behind it; one the dining space and external deck with solar battery store; and one the bedroom and a flexible space that adapts to visitors’ needs.

Exquisite detailing by builder GD Construction and their “amazing tradespeople… excited by the exacting requirements” includes a subtly faceted ceiling that expresses the diagonal measurement builders use to check rooms and foundations are truly square (based on Pythagorean Theorum and known in construction as ‘3-4-5’). Equally precise glazing captures exquisite vistas of the site’s three distinct ecologies: redgums from the living room, grassy woodlands from the bedroom and, beyond, looking south, the agrarian landscape of the canola field.

Place and process here are an exercise in shared custodianship for future generations. Simone says both are transforming her approach to design and teaching in ways she finds exciting. “We’ve started to be interested in the idea of living as care,” she says, “and the idea that care embeds you in a place.”

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