Wardle studio founder John Wardle takes inside magazine on a tour of his family beach house, an experimental brick beauty in Anglesea, Victoria.

Along the Great Ocean Road, dotted with popular Surf Coast spots on the lands of the Wadawurrung and Eastern Maar peoples, the sleepy town of Anglesea is best encapsulated by its old slogan: ‘Where bush meets sea’.

At this meeting point between Anglesea’s abundant heathlands and its long stretches of beach are cliffs – colossal clay formations that draw the awe of day-trippers and the concern of authorities who scramble to protect them from erosion.

Burnt Earth Beach House, designed by John Wardle for his family, is a homage to these natural beauties. The house overlooks the bush and sea from its position at the top of a historic landslip, mimicking the landscape’s hues through the use of an invented brick.

“The tonality, colour and hence the material are exactly as I could match that cliff face,” Wardle tells inside.

His terracotta concept begins in the interior of the home. It carries over the external façades and continues across a large outdoor table and fireplace, which are built-in to the ground. This prevailing colour palette deliberately gives Burnt Earth Beach House the appearance of a solid object, “almost as if it has been cast out of clay”.

“I like the deeper tonality,” Wardle explains. “Very often, if I look critically, coastal houses have a lot of areas of glass and then white plasterboard. This is the opposite – I wanted a house that was slightly moodier.”

His striking new residence is unrecognisable from the two-bedroom beach shack it once was, which Wardle, his wife Susan and their kids holidayed in for 18 years.

“It was a terrible house. It had been half burnt down in Ash Wednesday [bush fires]. The roofing timbers were all charred. It literally shook in the breeze,” he says.

“I always bemoan the loss of so many great little coastal cottages, but this was not one of them.”

Designing Burnt Earth Beach House entirely from Melbourne (Victoria’s COVID-era metro-regional ‘ring of steel’ prevented Wardle from travelling to the site even once), he elevated the architectural program up a storey to accommodate a new generation of Wardles. This had an intended secondary effect of making the higher front elevation, oriented toward the ocean and the landslip edge, appear “cliff-like”.

“Even the texture, the idea of this torn wet clay… exemplifies the weathering of the cliff,” he says.

Some architects design their own houses “lovingly and regularly”, as Wardle says he has always done. Others “shy away from it”.

“It allows you to re-embark on some really quite experimental work, but, at the same time, we often don’t have the budgets some of our clients have,” he explains.

The task brings out a canniness that Wardle believes defines a lot of Australian architecture.

“We’ve had this tradition of being canny, doing more with less and looking very carefully at how we orchestrate a strong architectural program – but with quite profound budget constraints. An architect working for themselves on their own home has that as a very big part of the mission,” he says.

With input from his family, Burnt Earth Beach House was Wardle’s weekend and night-time project, first designing the brick itself and then the house. Klynton Krause of Krause Bricks, a manufacturer from Central Victoria, came on board to facilitate the brick experiments. The pair had collaborated on Geelong College Junior School years earlier – a project Wardle realised, after the fact, had a high carbon load.

“To glaze bricks you fire them once – and use up a lot of carbon doing that – glaze them and then fire them a second time,” Wardle says. “I didn’t want to be responsible for that amount of carbon.”

He questioned whether they could glaze the raw clay and fire it only once for Burnt Earth Beach House. Krause wasn’t sure that this was possible, so they set up a series of tests. First, they glazed the bricks around the courtyard in blues and greys inspired by the ocean. Then, they created bricks for the outdoor fireplace that picked up the natural greens of the surrounding banksia trees.

In another “complete invention”, all of the outdoor bricks were extruded and torn. Rough, unglazed bricks blend with green and brown glazed bricks on the finished exterior, each one completely different up close.

“You could not predict what would happen. It was real alchemy,” Wardle says.

Buffered by two layers of insulation, the bricks within Burnt Earth Beach House are exactly the same as the outside, except with a smooth face. Terracotta tiles sourced from Cotto Manetti in Chianti, Italy, line the inside floors, joinery, and the walls of the bathroom and kitchen.

As terracotta conducts temperature well, the walls and the concrete slab are heavily insulated and sealed to ensure minimal temperature variation. The house is also 100 percent electric with a heat exchange water system, hydronic heating and solar panels.

“Spatially, I think it’s a very interesting house,” Wardle says. “It’s this massive void internally and it sits over these three pillars, which are the kitchen. The kitchen has three parts: timber, stainless steel and a terracotta part.”

The governing axes of the house are configured in a cruciform that meets in the central terracotta island bench. People come together at this “heart of the home” but can splinter off for separate activities in any of the four bedrooms or four living areas.

One of those living areas is Wardle’s three-by-10-metre study, which floats on the pillars above the kitchen, wrapped in a stainless steel tensile structure by Bespoke. While every other room has views to nature, the study hunkers down under a raking ceiling, turning its focus to a long desk and a shelf unit that displays a collection of international ceramics, alongside pieces designed by Wardle.

“The other thing about the house – as part of my age and experience as an architect – [is] it’s full of relationships,” he says. For example, Michele De Lucchi designed all the lights; close friends from the Burel textile company in Portugal made the fabrics; and long-time collaborator Simon Lloyd as well as artists from the Tiwi Islands are responsible for the paintings.

Despite this culmination of a creative existence, Burnt Earth Beach House was by no means Wardle’s life’s work, refined over many years. He and Susan always knew they were going to rebuild their holiday home, but they went to Anglesea to relax or go to the beach, not design.

Since construction finished at the end of 2023, the couple’s rituals are now steered by the movement of sunlight and wind around their new house. They have areas to congregate to the north, east and west.

“The front downstairs living area opens up to what we call our ‘morning terrace’,” Wardle says. “Very often we start the day having coffee out on that terrace, looking out over the ocean.”

When shadows start to creep over the morning terrace, they usually relocate to the side courtyard, which accepts the northern sun throughout the day. Two-fold awnings with timber-clad battens open up from the kitchen into this courtyard. The awnings, specially made with Tilt Industrial Design, have a secondary operable component to deliver more airflow and light inside, while providing shade outside.

More often than not, the couple takes their lunch at the concrete table in the courtyard under an old eucalypt. Wardle calls the table his “ode to Can Lis” because its tile pattern takes inspiration from the furniture inside a home of the same name inhabited by the late Danish architect Jørn Utzon.

“Those outdoor areas are us really pushing our social lives outside the house right round through the year,” Wardle says. In winter, this looks like cooking and sitting around the outdoor fire before the family finishes the day in the living or dining rooms. But the best bit of “theatre” – as Wardle calls it – occurs on a rainy day outside the western dining room window. The cut of the roof means that all of the water drains through a cantilevered terracotta spout and shoots onto a thoughtfully placed rock, which directs the stream into a small pond.

“With torrential rainfall, we can sit at the dining table and look out and see the water hammering down,” Wardle says.

Burnt Earth Beach House is a deeply personal and idiosyncratic project. Although Wardle also designed his Melbourne residence in Kew and another holiday home on Tasmania’s Bruny Island, none have garnered as much attention from passersby as this. He says people frequently stop to tell them how much they love the house and watched it being built – or to offer an opinion on how he could have made more of the ocean view.

“It’s caused an extraordinary amount of conversation, which we’re really pleased with,” Wardle says.

It has been something of a conversation-starter at the studio too, providing a prototype for larger applications of terracotta on commercial projects
such as the Melbourne Grammar School Centre for Humanities, a work in progress. According to Wardle, single-firing the raw glazed clay offers this “massive” building the opportunity to halve the carbon that would otherwise be produced in the brickmaking process.

“We think terracotta, environmentally, is a really good material to use. We now use timber in a much more cautious and considered way,” he says.

Wardle rarely starts a project by lining up powerful ambitions. Once the ideas behind Burnt Earth Beach House germinated – from the brick to the glazing to the spout – they started to grow exponentially into the finished project, which continues to give beyond its small corner block.

“It becomes an accumulation of enthusiasms rather than a single overriding ambition,” Wardle concludes.

All photography by Trevor Mein unless otherwise stated.

This article originally appeared in issue 120 of inside magazine. Grab your copy here.