Sand Dune Sanctuary

Set above the dunes in Sorrento on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, Sand Dune Sanctuary is a two-storey home that takes its cues from a small clutch of midcentury classics. The clients arrived with a book of references that had been earmarked for years, most pointedly the deep verandah of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House. That photograph, together with the coastal site, framed the brief.

Hindley & Co worked the modernist lineage of Mies, Neutra, Seidler and Utzon into the design without making it pastiche, locating the project in an international conversation that suited its widely travelled owners. A Seidleresque ramp climbs to a self-contained upper floor that anticipates ageing in place, while the lower ground floor accommodates a new laundry, guest quarters, and storage for a special car carved from previously underused space below.

The shared family, kitchen and dining room is arranged for sociability, in keeping with the modernist ethos. Open-plan living is enclosed by walls of bespoke joinery, a fireplace, clerestory windows, and floor to ceiling glass sliders. Architectural linen sheer curtains and Japanese-style sliding screens give the household fine control over privacy, light and outlook. Multifunctional joinery and flexible thresholds let rooms shift function and degree of privacy as needed.

Mies's Farnsworth House and the Barcelona Pavilion supplied the strongest reference for the cantilevered verandah. From the street, the double-storey volume reads as a single storey, one of several "less is more" moves the practice was keen to keep front and centre.

A 400 m2 home on a 1,000 m2 site, two building levels, completed 2019.

Architects and interior designers: Hindley & Co. Landscape designer: Fiona Brockhoff Design. Photography: Tatjana Plitt.