Cathedral House
Cathedral House is a new residential build in Thornton, Victoria, sited on a rural hillside property overlooking the Cathedral Ranges. The project was designed as a weekend retreat for a family seeking easy, low-maintenance living with a strong connection to the surrounding landscape — a place made for entertaining, for relaxing, and for being fully present in its surroundings.
The building is composed of two forms arranged in an L around a central courtyard and sheltered timber deck, under a corrugated gabled roof. External materials include vertical timber cladding and board-formed concrete, with the concrete end walls — punctuated by a circular window — forming the primary gesture on approach.
Materials were selected for their resilience as much as for their aesthetic qualities. The project is located within a fire-prone region, and during construction the house came within a few hundred metres of advancing bushfires, saved by the efforts of fire crews and locals. The building is nestled into the earth, with introduced native planting kept minimal — low maintenance and carefully chosen to soften the house into the landscape rather than impose upon it.
The house is set into the hillside, with the northern edge buried into the rock face and the land falling away to the south toward the Cathedral Ranges and the open valley below. On the northern side, the pool and outdoor entertaining terrace sit in a protected, sun-drenched enclosure, sheltered from the elements by the rising rock face behind.
The southern façade opens completely in the opposite direction: full-height sliding glazing frames the Cathedral Ranges on the horizon, drawing in light and cross ventilation, and dissolving the boundary between inside and out. This is a home designed to be lived in and through the environment, rather than simply beside it.
Every room has a deliberate and distinct relationship with the landscape. The main living areas look south over the valley and ranges. Bedrooms face west into the close intimacy of the eucalypt bushland. In the master ensuite, the circular window becomes something more intimate still: the Cathedral Ranges are framed from within the shower, reflected and refracted through reeded glass, folding the landscape into even the most private moments of the day.
Throughout, the architecture prioritises the landscape over the interior. The material palette — polished plaster, pale timber joinery, board-formed concrete, stone benchtops whose veining echoes the exposed rock of the surrounding hills, and terrazzo — is chosen to recede rather than compete.
This restraint carries through to the interiors, where natural fibres, linens, wools, leather, and timber ground every surface and furnishing in the tactile qualities of the natural world. The colour palette is drawn entirely from the bushland beyond — the bleached gold of dry grasses, the cool grey of exposed rock, the deep greens of eucalypt scrub, and the warm ochres of bare earth — so that inside and outside feel not like separate worlds, but a single continuous one.
Furniture pieces from the owner’s own furniture company are placed throughout, sitting within the spaces with an ease that speaks to a deep understanding of how objects and architecture sit together.
Cathedral House is ultimately a home defined by its landscape — shaped by it, sheltered by it, and opened to it at every turn. It is a place where the architecture quietly steps aside and the land takes its rightful place at the centre of daily life: built to be used and enjoyed for decades to come, a solid and peaceful addition to the hillside it sits upon.
