GREEN keeper

The owners' shared love of golf is omnipresent in this home on Victoria's Bellarine Peninsula. Hugging dunes beside a first fairway, it touches the earth lightly, and inside and out become one.

- Chris Pearson

The owners of this wonderful weekender on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula are golfing fanatics. So much so that, in their search for the perfect property for themselves and their three adult daughters, proximity to a golf course topped the wish list. Beside a first fairway, this new home couldn’t be any closer; it is so close that architect Kirby Roper of Kirby Architects designed the timber facade to deflect stray golf balls. In this and other ways, she has blended the building so skilfully into the landscape that she has scored her own metaphorical hole-in-one. When the couple bought the property in 2020, it was squandered by a 1960s boxy bungalow with tired interiors. Strangely, it turned its back on the golf course and the ocean beyond on its southern side, views of which the couple were keen to harness. Having launched a drone to see what was possible, they were smitten.

“With that special view of the golf course, it was a no-brainer,” says the owner. So they asked Kirby to design a new getaway, with living areas facing the golf course on one side and north on the other.