Lal Lal / Trunk House
Residential
Year - 2009
Client - Private Client
Scope - Sketch design through to contract admin
Location - Lal Lal, Western District, Victoria
Budget - $1m
Team - Stutterheim / Anderson Landscape Architecture with Paul Morgan Architects
A determined effort was required to achieve absolute minimum change to the silent 3.6 hectare forested slopes, from the crown of the hill, down15 meters of trees unmarked by anything but the long-past fire scorch on the older tree trunks, and the windswept wheel track of an occasional cross-country biker, down to the stream.
Here, 15K from the nearest country pub, we sliced a track in the forest to the cabin that Paul Morgan is fashioning. The track’s slight cut is now being lined with a folded ribbon of drystone wall which threads its way up and through the cabin’s car port, and beyond to become a sunny seating wall for breakfast in the courtyard to the east, before trailing off into the slope. The cabin’s structure is whittled from bifurcated tree trunks indigenous to this ecological niche.
We have all touched the ground lightly here: picked out the blueberry, pruned the trees immediate to the cabin of their dead wood, broadcast the chippings to feed the soil, and ensured adequate water collection off the roof, and a three-point fire-truck turn in case of fire. The cut’s spoil has simply been reused to build up the horizontal breakfast place. Ensuring the barest minimum intervention was also the client’s desire but nonetheless required the identification and evaluation of each tree to satisfy the anxieties of both the council and the fire care requirements of the Department of Sustainability and the Environment. The Kookaburra sings.
