Most Loved Online - 9 Bluff Avenue, Flinders
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Flinders sits between three very different forces: the calm waters of Western Port to the north, rugged cliffs and ocean beaches facing Bass Strait to the south, and rolling rural countryside to the rear.
Commercial development has largely bypassed Flinders, leaving its streetscape and foreshore intact. An hour from Melbourne, it has the quality of somewhere genuinely remote.
Bluff Avenue sits within one of Flinders' most tightly held waterside enclaves. At number nine, a collaboration between two of Australia's most respected design houses has produced a home that is architecturally ambitious without overwhelming its setting.
From a distance, the house reads almost as bushland - weathered timber cladding the colour of silver gum bark, the roofline tucked beneath a canopy of mature eucalypts, landscape designer Fiona Brockhoff's coastal planting extended to blur the boundary between house and bush.
Inarc Architects designed the building with two faces, the northern side in warm blackbutt timber, looking over paddocks and pine windbreaks, and the southern in dark steel and glass, turned toward the coast. The angles between them create sheltered outdoor spaces that work as escapes from the wind and sun.
Step inside and the living room stops you: a full wall of glass framing Western Port through the white limbs of ancient gums, the water beyond a vivid blue spotted with white boats. Inarc is best known for its interdisciplinary approach, evident here in a first floor plan that bends around the existing trees. Architecture and interiors have been conceived as one, every room oriented to the view, from floating balconies over the bay to a main bedroom that wakes to open water.
A heated lap pool sits among the Brockhoff planting. Hydronic heating, a lift and an automated pool cover mean it works as well in July as it does in January.
Presented for the first time, this is as good as the Peninsula gets.
Proudly marketed by the team at Peninsula Sotheby's International Realty.
