Hydro House


Interior design and fitout
Greens Beach, Lutruwita
2024



Living Landscape
Suburban rewilding
Greens Beach, Lutruwita
2025



Interior, furniture design and fabrication
Greens Beach
2024  
 With this renovation project we sought to extend the life of a 100-year-old Hydro workers cottage in regional Tasmania — to save a home that would otherwise be nearing its end of life and demolished. The insertion of a plywood core re-imagines the interior space while eliminating the need for major structural work or building outside of the existing footprint. Existing timber furniture was salvaged, refinished and reused, keeping it out of landfill. Benchtops use reclaimed Tasmanian hardwood; cork was selected for its inherent hygroscopic and insulative properties. Healthy finishes, chosen for improved interior air quality, are used throughout the project: tung oil, natural hard wax, and water-based sealers — thereby improving indoor air quality and resulting in a low allergen, healthy interior space. Employing design-for-repair principles in construction and natural surface finishes is a way of enabling current and future users to safely carry out service, repair, or touch-ups without the need for specialist interventions or harsh toxic chemical-based solvents or cleaning agents.

This kind of minimal intervention is an important focus for Practice Matters, working to save existing houses from demolition through a few considered interventions that improve liveability without the environmental, material, energy, and time costs of new building.










Ongoing
Landscape design
Greens Beach
2025 On the fringes of Narawntapu national park in northern Lutruwita/Tasmania we are working on a landscape rewilding project surrounding a private residence. By employing ecological and climate-adaptive design principles including waste reuse, greywater recirculation, drought and frost tolerant plantings, we are working to restore habitat for native insects, birds, reptiles, and small marsupials. 

This project is a living prototype and demonstration project of our approach in working with nature, providing a counterpoint and alternative to wholesale clearing of native flora and habitat loss associated with adjacent suburban development patterns and practices. 













Ongoing
Material Demonstration Project
Collaborator: Felix Joensson
St Marys
2026 Ghost Cabin is a project that arose from research into bioregional design in Northeast Tasmania. The site is remote, 800m above sea level, nestled within dense forest and rocky outcrops. Limitations in conventional building, driven by location and scarcity of resources, led us to develop a scaled process of material procurement.

We start with the site as the primary material source, conducting a reclamation audit of existing materials and identifying what natural resources are in abundance. From there, we shift out focus slowly outwards, examining the local town, then extending out to the bioregion. Once these three scales are exhausted, we turn to conventional material supply chains.

The resulting design gleans nearly half of its materials from the site, with only 35% sourced from outside the bioregion. 




Scale
1. Site


2. Locale


3. Bioregion


4. Beyond

Defined By
Control, direct intervention, autonomy.


Daily travel envelope, community resources.


Distributed resource networks, industry, geology and ecology.

Everything beyond contextually meaningful local and regional networks. Key Questions
What do we physically touch?
What is already here? 

Where do everyday interactions, participation, and small-scale sourcing occur?

Where do core material systems, skills and fabrication networks operate? and what are they? 

What must be imported or sourced from national or global systems? 






Materials available on the site: reclaimed timber and stone from a dismantled extension to the existing cabin.