Nulla Vale House and Shed

Nulla Vale sits an hour beyond Tullamarine Airport, where Melbourne's tract housing gives way to pastoral land, small rural communities and the old agricultural outbuildings of early settlers. Those simple, almost primitive structures, bound tightly to their landscape, set the guiding principle for this project by MRTN Architects.

The setting is granite country, a terrain shaped over millions of years and altered again by clearing and grazing, where erosion has stripped the softer rock to leave hard igneous outcrops exposed. The 300-acre parcel of pastoral land carries those granite outcrops and the occasional gum tree. The clients intend to build their permanent home here eventually, but first asked for a basic dwelling with minimal amenity, a place to spend weekends while they form a connection to the land and begin caretaking the site. They also needed a shed for land care equipment and for the photovoltaic panels and battery that power the house. With no mains connection of any kind, the dwelling runs 100 per cent off-grid.

The chosen building site occupies a saddle of land halfway along a desire line running from the property's high point to a natural ledge with distant views west. MRTN Architects conceived the two structures as settler wagons arrested in motion as they pass through the site. House and shed share identical overall dimensions, and from a distance both read as the familiar gable-ended silhouette of a farm shed. Up close, material, void and volume tell them apart. The shed was custom designed with a shed fabrication company using its standard systems, clad entirely in heritage-grade corrugated galvanised iron with the roof pitched and oriented to maximise solar exposure across the seasons.

The house is built from salvaged bricks and corrugated iron alongside rough sawn timber, with new galvanised roofing carried on pre-engineered timber trusses left exposed inside and out. Materials were chosen so the house sits within the cognitive idea of an old shed. Internally the finishes match the exterior, with no plasterboard and no paint, while concealed LED strips on top of the rafters bounce light off the foil-backed insulation. At 50 m2, completed in 2018 on a budget of USD 250,000, the single-storey house provides the means to eat, sleep and wash in a space that stays part of the experience of being on the land rather than removed from it.

Architect: MRTN Architects. Photography: Peter Bennetts.