WONDER WHARF

ccessed by boat, this private idyll on Pittwater, NSW, is the perfect place for cooking, reading and communing with nature, sundowner in hand. Interior designer Louella Boîtel-Gill played up the treehouse vibe with loose, linen furnishings and splashes of jade set against the romantic Australian landscape. I was in a meeting with the client about something entirely different and he asked me out of the blue if I’d be interested in working The fact the house is offshore means logistically it’s a bit of a puzzle. The wharf is only accessible to the bigger barges that carry building materials at the highest tides, so there was this tight window of a few hours every couple of weeks when we could make deliveries happen. It meant if the truck was late to the cargo wharf to unload onto the barge, it had the potential to hold us up for two weeks. Luckily we managed to scrape through each time but it was nerve-racking. Weight and size are always an issue when it comes to barging things across to an offshore property. The kitchen table is quite heavy so I designed the top in sections that could be joined together on site. This is where the double-ended dovetail joints came in, which are throughout the Oregon joinery. It made transportation a little easier. This was a home that wasn’t going to be lived in full-time so we kept storage to a minimum unlike most houses where you try to work out clever solutions to maximise storage. The client wanted to keep an airy simplicity to the space, uncluttered but homely. It needed to function as somewhere he could drop into at any time – set up and ready to go, cosy and comfortable but easy to maintain. The original owner, who designed the house to live in with his wife, built it on the site of an old cottage and the bedroom downstairs has the original sandstone walls around the base. The whole house opens up with timber-framed sliding glass doors so there’s no real need for air conditioning with the flow-through of fresh air. There are huge gum trees up behind the house that offer shade and shelter from the summer sun. And they use the boatshed as their office with their commuter boat tied at the end of the wharf on an engineered pontoon, which doubles as the perfect spot for a G&T at sundown. There’s no artwork other than a few pieces of basketware hung on the wall. The house is mainly glass so there are very few surfaces to hang artwork. The furniture makes the space feel comfortable and homely but not cluttered, and what had been an open-plan kitchen/living/dining room and office space became a simple kitchen with a sofa on one side and hanging chairs on the other. The island bench is the kitchen and dining table and is plumbed with a sink and handmade copper tap. The verandah is set up with a double hanging chair, which maintains an airiness in a space where the priority was to keep the view to the water clear. They love it and feel very at home. The boatshed is the space they use the most, opening all the glass doors and hanging down by the water’s edge. The privacy and the magic of the journey to get there. Who wouldn’t love jumping in a tinny to get home?