A Concrete Coastal Retreat on the Mornington Peninsula Where Three Cultures Meet.

Perched above Port Phillip Bay on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, Mori House is the kind of project that rewards a slow look. Completed in 2023, this off-form concrete residence at Mount Martha marks the first Australian building by Portuguese practice Aires Mateus—a studio whose Lisbon work we’ve long admired—realised on the ground by Melbourne firm MA+Co for Neometro’s Jeff Provan and his wife, Mariko.

The house unfolds as a loose cluster of pavilions set out on a roughly cruciform plan. The geometry carves the grounds into four distinct gardens—pool, lawn, olive grove, vegetable patch—and there are no corridors, so each space opens directly into the next. Overhead, slender cross-shaped skylights slip blades of light through the concrete ceilings, shifting in intensity as the day turns. It’s an arrangement that lets a multigenerational family gather or scatter as the mood dictates, cosy for two and generous for many.

Pa.te.os in Melides: Four Contemporary Holiday Houses by Manuel Aires Mateus.

Fancy yourself a getaway? Pa.te.os sculpts four individual houses that embraces the topography of Portugal’s Alentenjo.

The material story is deliberately spare: off-form concrete poured in situ, natural timber, and little else. No painted surfaces, no plasterboard, no downlights. Character comes instead from proportion, texture and the slow drift of light across raw concrete—the restraint that has defined Aires Mateus for decades, here weathering into a coastal patina that only improves with age.

Japan runs quietly through the whole project. “Mori” means “forest”—and, fittingly, it’s also Mariko’s family name. A tatami room sits near the centre of the plan, while the broader approach borrows Japanese ideas of stillness, simplicity and careful spatial sequencing. A sculptural concrete stair climbs to a rooftop belvedere with long views across the bay and the gnarled tea-tree landscape below.

Order Matter's Raw House Champions Honest Architecture in Seoul's Dense Urban Landscape.

Rather than relying on decorative flourishes, every decision serves a functional purpose, from the curved stair landing that maximises space to the concealed lighting that promotes calm.

“Architecture is an incomplete art, only finished by the life that fills it,” Manuel Aires Mateus has said—a line that lands squarely here. For all its monolithic presence, Mori House was conceived as a “forever house”: a relaxed, shoes-off beach shack rendered in concrete and built to hold a family for generations.

What makes it sing is the collaboration itself—an internationally revered architect, a considered local practice and a design-led developer, drawing Portuguese restraint, Japanese quiet and the Australian coast into one coherent whole. Monumental and intimate at once—and already recognised with a Residential Architecture commendation from the Australian Institute of Architects—it’s a beautifully argued case for architecture built to last.

The House at Flat Rock by Billy Maynard.

A powerful debut project for Billy Maynard, the House at Flat Rock embraces the surroundings and is constructed with grace, leaving a minimal interruption to the landscape.

[Photography by Brook James.]