Ochota Basket Range Outdoor Room, SA, 2019
Extant cold, gloomy house in a tight valley, with no views out – yet a charmer in the settler tradition. The Ochota’s new Outdoor Room seeks to re-dress this with brave informality and maximised site connection. We’ve enabled hilltops views through ipeeling roofs that connect with north-ish sun. There’s sliding walls, glazed and unglazed to open to outdoor space east and west (celebrating sunrise and sunset), with connection both ways: to outdoor lawned and swimming places westward, and down the wavy piazza-as-driveway to the winery work place below and eastward. Southward, digging into the hillside are ancillary areas – wine cave, pantry and wine cave, laundry, bathroom, sauna. The Outdoor Room’s textures are raw and polished: grafted on to the rediscovered stone back wall of the old house is a balanced textural composition of ‘raw’ and ‘polished’: off-form concrete, softened with spotted gum linings and joinery and licks of raw steel; off-whites to reflect and carry light from clerestory windows, and wonderglas eaves to stretch the intake of light from verandahed edges.