Homestead House by MRTN Architects in Mount Martha, Australia conjures the spirit of abandoned farmsteads—a home built from the longing for places that no longer exist.
Drive through rural Australia long enough and you'll encounter them: chimneys standing alone in paddocks, brick sentinels marking where houses once gathered families. These remnant structures—too solid to fall, too incomplete to shelter—carry a particular melancholy. For a client in Mount Martha with childhood memories of farm life, they also carried possibility.
MRTN Architects translated this emotional brief into a house organized around absence. Two offset corridors meet at a double-height entry hall built from rammed earth and Spotted Gum timber. A glazed skylight cuts through the roof above, casting light down the vertical shaft like the sun finding the hollow core of a ruined chimney. The form quotes the farmstead vernacular without imitating it—a new building that nonetheless feels like something remembered.
The material palette reinforces this temporal ambiguity. Rammed earth walls, their horizontal striations recording the compaction process, possess the same geological patience as old stone. Corrugated metal roofing—a practical choice in bushfire-prone terrain—reads as equally contemporary and traditional. Timber screens and battens warm the composition, their vertical rhythms breaking the mass into domestic scale.
The plan itself borrows from agricultural logic. Rooms cluster around the central hall like outbuildings around a farmhouse. Covered walkways connect sleeping quarters to living spaces, creating that distinctive rural sequence of moving through weather to reach shelter. The boundaries between inside and outside blur in the manner of working properties where doors stay open and verandas serve as primary living space.
What MRTN has achieved is something rarer than mere style: a house that makes memory habitable. The client's childhood farm exists now only in recollection, but Homestead House provides a place where its emotional reality can continue. The chimney still stands; the family gathers around it once more.
