Windgrove building

Located approximately in the middle of this photo is a two thousand square foot house, an office, a toilet block, a sculpture studio, a 30 foot Bedford bus, two shipping containers and three water tanks.

Having trouble finding them? This is because a very important design consideration at Windgrove is to build so that no one walking along or surfing at Roaring Beach will see any structures on the landscape.

This isn’t because I want privacy; rather, I feel that the uniqueness of Roaring Beach is that it is still a fairly wild landscape and that exposing any architecture, no matter how beautiful, would detract from this wild quality.

By tucking the buildings at Windgrove into a grove of silver peppermint trees, I had to sacrifice the grand sweeping view, but over the years I have begun to appreciate the importance of viewing landscape through the “little windows” created by gaps in trees, etc..

Like everyone, when I first bought Windgrove back in 1991, my first thought was to build my “dream” home on a section of land where I would have commanding views of the beach, be sheltered from southerly winds and have plenty of sun.

This was certainly possible, but what I hadn’t taken into account, and what most architects and home owners fail to take into account, is what visual impact this house would have on the landscape.

In other words, would this house enhance or degrade the visual appearance and character of Roaring Beach?

In 1993, before building anything, I drove a converted Beford bus onto the land, tucked it into the trees and planned to live in it for a couple of years to “listen” to the land in order to best locate a future building site.

Within a week, a Roaring Beach neighbor came up to me and said: “I can see your bus through the trees while I’m surfing and it doesn’t look good”.

Although I was correct in wanting to listen to the land, what I had failed to “listen” to were the concerns of my community. From this point forward, their concerns were my concerns.

I had every legal right to build whatever and wherever I wanted and my artistic ego certainly wanted to express itself out in the open, but the lesson quickly learned was that visual structures on private land, like noise itself, knows no boundaries.

I had a moral obligation to respect the wishes of my community and to those visitors who came to Roaring Beach wanting to walk and swim in a relatively wild environment.