Harry High Performance House

Harry High Performance House sits in the coastal town of Anglesea on Victoria's Surf Coast, owner-built by us and completed in 2021. The design draws directly from the Lendlease Beachcomber homes built across Australia in the early 1960s — elevated on stilts, with a long north-facing veranda under a deep, low-pitch roof. That form suits passive solar design as much as it suited the original beach shacks, and it turned out to suit a high-performance outcome too.

Our brief to ourselves was simple: freedom is knowing you don't need more than just enough. The elevated dwelling is a modest 120m², built as a two-bedroom home with a generous feel despite its size. Underneath, the undercroft holds a 40m² garage and an 18m² studio we use as a work-from-home space, along with room to conceal services and rainwater tanks. Altogether, the building footprint covers just 25% of the site — the rest left as habitat.

The corner allotment gave us good orientation to the north without sacrificing amenity, and we kept four mature Messmate Stringybark trees, one at each corner of the site, rather than clearing them. The block slopes from south to north, which we worked around to keep the home genuinely accessible throughout.

Externally, the material palette stays simple and respectful of what's already in the township: blackbutt timber windows and doors, paired with vertical fibre cement boards that meet the site's BAL-29 bushfire requirements, in keeping with the beach shacks still standing nearby.

We kept glazing off the west entirely and let in ample natural light through the north and south instead. Larger glazing ratios like ours aren't always the low-energy textbook answer, but living this close to the coast means we can lean on cross-flow ventilation through summer instead, cutting our cooling loads without needing to shrink the glass.

Harry House is a low-energy non certified passive house — efficient and resilient, and built to make the most of its site and its coastal position.