*The Kitchen Swim Through, a*nalog collage, 2024.

The Big Blue House is a small domestic structure conceived as a living system — designed to shift with season, use, and ecological succession.

The approximately 9 × 9 metre footprint is derived from the residents’ habitual campsite layout. Existing trees and a regenerated bush corridor determine the building’s placement, allowing the house to settle into the site rather than overwrite it.

The plan operates as a single room divided by one internal wall, producing a front-of-house / back-of-house condition for living and working states. A full-height opening wall faces north; a low bench and window seat orient south toward the street. A small aperture through the internal wall enables informal exchange with neighbours from the kitchen. Above, a minimal mezzanine holds a “tent room” — a provisional sleeping space suspended within the volume.

The structure is intentionally incomplete.

Its framework is designed to be edited, reworked, and adapted from within over time.

At the southern edge of the site stands an elderly Marri tree, estimated to be hundreds of years old. The house gives them space. Through successive dry summers they has been tended by hand, and remains central to the project’s orientation and ethic of care.

The dwelling is imagined as a companion to this tree and to the site’s emerging ecology — engaging in quiet exchange with vineyards to the east through an edible garden composed of endemic, introduced, and novel species.

The project draws from domestic memory and cultural reference — including Bear in the Big Blue House — alongside the couple’s previous homes: a cottage, a studio cabin, and a former church.

Located on Wadandi Country in Cowaramup, Western Australia, the house is currently under construction, with completion anticipated in 2026.

*Tent Room Window, a*nalog collage, 2024.

2025/—/— The Big Blue House

CATALOGUE : in progress*

LOCATION : Wadandi Country, Cowaramup, Western Australia

DESIGN MENTOR: Karen Ford

CLIENT: Alice Anna Ford and Harrison Jay Dee

this project is dedicated to Marri