Stage one of the six-stage development in Croobyar Road was approved by Shoalhaven City Council on September 6, 2009. The “ambitious and innovative” seniors’ living community will lay the foundation for what is expected to be “one of country NSW’s finest over 55s lifestyle communities”. The Claydon Park community will be situated on just under 100 acres of which it is planned to have 70 per cent open space and landscape areas.

The Master Plan includes spacious villas, terraces and cottages from one-and-a-half bedrooms through to luxury four bedroom homes. The clients require that each residence be capable of providing the ultimate in architectural, eco friendly, smart design to accommodate today’s and tomorrow’s rapidly changing trends, needs and expectations.

The union of the three practices provides an in-built strategy to achieve a desirable level of diversity, with Tonkin Zulaikha Greer as managing architects.

Landscape was considered an important aspect of the design to better integrate the development into the established neighbouring streetscape and to draw on the Burley Griffin urban planning of nearby Castlecrag with narrow streets and verge treatments and roadways shared with pedestrians. A series of typical house designs provided increased urban densities whilst maintaining environmental and privacy standards for each household.

Tonkin Zulaikha Greer have designed one quadrant of the village, a complex of seven luxury houses. Each house reconciles the southern views with a desirable northern aspect for sunlight. Each has a low-impact footprint to reduce impacts on the habitats of indigenous fauna. Carefully managed strategies for rainwater collection, high-score BASIX envelopes and the retention of all significant trees have ensured that the development has minimum environmental impact on this unique site.

The houses form a related group, with each having an individual response to its location and unique planning. Each house is a composition of elegant prismatic shapes, inflected to provide sunlight and views, and providing a variety of roof shapes. The houses are designed in a simple combination of sandstone and timber. Key urban design locations are celebrated with sandstone structures that terminate major site vistas, mark the corners and edges of roads and common areas, and enliven the experience of the site as a whole.

The main living space is double-height. The expressive form of its folded plywood roof reaches through the wall to form a sunshade for its exposed glazing. On the upper floor, the main bedrooms and study are reached from a gallery bridge across this space.

Externally the house has a dual character – to the north and facing the courtyard, the forms are playful and expressive, while the southern riverfront elevation recalls a pure ideal of the classical villa, with three pavilions raised on a blank base. The external walls are grey-stained ply, jointed with aluminium tee sections. Windows and solid shutters slide across the face of the walls, to leave the openings free of framing.

The house has been designed as a comfortable retreat for a family that will eventually spend more time away from their house in the city. Formed as two adjoining gabled pavilions, the building sits firmly on a solid brick base with a lighter timber and glass structure above. The interior has a flow of space from the upper level entrance to the ground level, where the living rooms open to the view and the sun.

Originally, the house had sat on its headland, overlooking the beach on one side and the Tasman Sea on the other. We wanted to restore that privilege. Beneath saw tooth roof forms we angled three walls to march towards Bondi Beach and turned another toward Hastings Parade and the ocean. Beach and ocean views are now seen from every new room, and the sun flows throughout.

A beach and boat theme is used everywhere, in the use of natural stone in the bathrooms and timber floors and trim. The joinery lining the stair is ‘sea foam’ coloured polyurethane, and the white walls give a reflective open-air shimmer to the place.

The house is developed from a strong southern street wall of glazed brick with an inbuilt pattern in two shades of black. This three-storey wall is a gesture to the public, an abstracted billboard and a rampart, as well as a reference to the vanishing industrial heritage of the area. Internally, circulation is in a one metre zone along this wall and is defined by thick masonry walls, articulated to form cupboards and lighting recesses.

Light is brought into the lower levels of this zone through a clerestory window that captures the northern sun. The circulation zone extends beyond the house as a floating timber entry bridge and a small upper-level balcony.

The northern part of the house accommodates the living spaces and bedrooms, and is expressively timber framed, scaled and detailed to sympathise with the adjoining small Victorian houses. The end elevations open to the views: east to the dramatic city skyline, and west to a small forest of eucalypts on the site’s rocky outcrop.

The house has carefully resolved active and passive ESD systems, including enhanced natural ventilation with clerestory ‘breeze catchers’, heat pump in-floor heating and cooling, and computer-modelled sun shading. Low-energy and recycled natural materials are used throughout, with a minimum of applied finishes.

The scheme develops as a tall timber-framed ‘castle’, piled up along a straight stair. Its robust forms are cantilevered and interlocking, sheltered under a single plane of roof whose slope matches the tree canopy. The plan inflects to retain huge sandstone boulders, which stabilise and define the steep site. The building’s junction with the ground is carefully controlled to respect the fragile surface of the 45∞ slope and remnant lush bushland. An earlier garage and studio on the street frontage were reconstructed to confirm with the architecture of the main house.

A restrained palette of surfaces and detail has been selected with long-life, simple materials; treated timber poles, durable hardwood, zinc, with unpainted fibre cement walls, roof, gutters and ceilings. All will relax, grey and uncoated, into the bush setting.

Every room sees the surf; every room is private yet connected; every room has a different height and aspect, with a different view of the bush. The kitchen is a bridge and a link – the heart of the house.

The structure is celebrated, allowed to be separate from the simple walls and partitions. Windows occur only where they are needed. The conserved natural rock outcrops on the site join with the architecture to form exterior ‘rooms.

The project was designed by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer with Ellen Woolley.

It is conceived as a linear room addressing the garden. The scenario is a wonderful long dining table set formally on the grass – the guests usually including at least one celebrity chef (Tony Bilson and Tetsuya Wakuda were consulted on the equipment) and the show on offer being the theatre of preparation of the meal.

The room is a simple glazed element. The details are careful, meeting without matching the existing house. A strict requirement was to preserve a number of plants along the kitchen’s garden wall, requiring the glazing to subtly shift to miss the roots.