A quest for equilibrium shapes and fuels the practice of Sparks Architects, their craft is often characterised by an unparalleled balance between work and personal life, apparent by the collective team’s move from a five to a four-day work week. Known best for their construction of the Ridge House in 2015 which featured rammed-earth walls and spotted gum timbers, the design firm continues to conceptualise enviable residencies.

Sparks Architects Construct A Defiant Object In A Windswept Landscape

Completed in 2018, the Spinnaker House marks the firm’s most recent project, which reconciles another monumental setting on a precarious site. Perched over the edge of an escarpment on Hervey Bay, Queensland, the Spinnaker House seeks to balance the visual opportunities of the landscape, while providing sanctuary from the windy coastal environment.

Defined by the site’s topography, orientation, exposure to the elements and its surrounding landscape, the building responds through systems of blocking and filtering, incorporating walls of sliding glass, screens, and large scale automated clerestories, to create a spatial dynamic, reminiscent of a full sail, or a Spinnaker. Standing parallel to the sloped ground, the continuity of its roof and wall, stabilize its position, as the house itself represents a defiant object in a windswept landscape.

By Julia Roxan