Ramp House design by Architects Corner | William Corner

Warragul has been shortlisted for completed projects: House of the Year WAF 2015.. 

https://www.worldarchitecturefestival.com/webform_submission/6343

Warragul House is a sustainable design solution in a rural context.

The ability to run on natural elements as the cost of running and connecting to electricity and water is getting expensive in a rural and isolated location.

Natural light is embraced with a concave shaped North facing facade; glazed openings allow the sun to enter the building from Am to Pm. The summer months can be brutal in the afternoon, so a cantilevered balcony is strategically placed on the North west side, which provides the right amount of shade. This also happens to be the best spot to sit with a glass of wine and admire the view over the lake, creek bed and tree lines that continue the organic curve embedded in the dwelling footprint. 

The clients brief expressed a desire to wrap themselves around the lake. So we did... literally, We threw stones into the water, and watched the ripples collide with each other, creating little avenues and passages, we imagined walking through Richard sellers leaning metal clad curving corridors and thought, is that like walking though frozen ripples? 

The concrete ramp replaces the need for a staircase, and although stairs are naturally sculptural features of a home, a ramp just makes it that much more interesting, like walking down the slope of the hill, yet inside...

The ramp sits between two mammoth concrete curved walls... Each panel prefabricated, and yes we went the extra distance and actually curved the faces, as we walked through the concrete plant, the foreman advised us "Better if you don’t tell em' you’re the architects".....

Each curved wall or spine if you like has a different radius, much like the ripples at any moment in time, one wall along the ramp displaced a little as though shale had detached from the stone in mid-air and created its own ripples that collided and created its own ground zero on the pond.

The concrete surprisingly works very well as a thermal sponge, absorbing the heat gain from the sun and releasing at night internally. The clients have said they did not required heating for two thirds of their first winter, and are yet to experience the summer months, so in essence it does perform very well as a sustainable habitat, although you could argue the use of materials and the construction process are far from a sustainable solution to building design....