Wildcoast by Studio Kennon Builds for Bass Strait’s Wind, Rain and Salt.

On the exposed southern tip of the Mornington Peninsula, where the land gives way to Bass Strait, and the weather rarely stays soft for long, Studio Kennon has built a home that doesn’t fight the wind, rain and salt—it responds by settling into them. Wildcoast, the studio’s newly completed residence in Portsea, was designed with that fact firmly front of mind.

The natural elements’ intensity here is real: wind that arrives unbroken off the Southern Ocean, rain that travels across the open horizon, air thick with salt. Rather than shutting the elements out completely, Studio Kennon has let them shape the plan.

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

At Mori House, Japanese calm and the Australian coast are drawn into one coherent, built-to-last whole.

A long east-to-west wing holds the private spaces, while a glazed living pavilion pushes north. Together with a third form, the two meet as three shelters wrapped around a central light court and garden, so on calmer days the operable walls slide back and house and garden blur into one. When the weather turns—and on this stretch of coast, it turns often—the pavilion becomes the retreat: warm, enclosed, angled away from the worst of the wind, with room to simply watch it roll through instead.

The home was designed for model Brooke Hogan and her husband Myles Pitt, owner of nearby Hotel Sorrento, and it carries a piece of family history with it. Stone salvaged from the historic hotel has been worked into the entry, linking Wildcoast back to the Pitt family’s roots on this part of the Peninsula, long before the house itself existed.

Studio Kennon frames the project as a considered response to place rather than a stance against it: the rendered exterior is built to weather with the salt air and coastal winds it’s exposed to, ageing alongside the landscape rather than resisting it. It’s less a house that occupies the land, more one that’s found a way to sit in conversation with it.

It’s a smart read on the brief. Coastal architecture so often tries to out-muscle the elements with glass, steel and bravado. Wildcoast doesn’t bother with the fight—it just gets on with living alongside Bass Strait’s worst days. Felix Forest’s photography, all moody sky and weathered stone, tells the rest of the story.

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Architecture is often known to disrupt the landscape. Merricks Farmhouse's determination to maintain a single line within the landscape exudes quiet power.

[Images courtesy of Studio Kennon. Photography by Felix Forest .]