In this issue...

Much-awarded architect Peter Stutchbury describes his latest acclaimed residential creation as one of restraint – an enclave that offers the users comfort, ease, place and dreaming, and promotes contemplation.

The Seaford Life Saving Club – conceived more as a landscape object than a complete (singular) building – was one of the most widely acclaimed timber designs in Australia for 2008.

The use of reclaimed timber as an exposed structural element that exhibits strength, power and beauty is a major focal point of a new gymnasium at one of Australia’s premier health and lifestyle retreats.

The award-winning ‘Fale’ by New Zealand architect Ross Brown is notable for many reasons – not least that it is probably the world’s first prison-based traditional Polynesian meeting house, which is the focus of a violence prevention program.

A ‘West Coast Modern’ Canadian building aesthetic combines with the site environment to make Wakefield Beach Homes a harmonious community that blends sea, beach, forest and people.

The philosophy behind this Sydney terraced house renovation was to make a contemporary addition using materials and forms that were inherently sympathetic to the original structure, with timber playing a significant role in finishing and detailing.

Sheerwater Lakehouse is a country retreat for the city-based owners of a deer farm on South Head Peninsula in the sparsely populated and often rustic Kaipara region of New Zealand’s North Island coast.

The innovative ideas behind one of the largest clear span timber buildings in New Zealand are being viewed as a model for future engineered wood projects.

Samford House is a play on its location in a rural residential community about 25 km west of downtown Brisbane, seen as a piece of the ‘city wall’ – overlapped by a robust timber ‘outback’ building.

Major law firm Gadens wanted an iconic renovation that conveyed ‘fresh, new and timeless’ – and the end result was judged the best interior fit-out featuring decorative wood veneers in the 2007 Australian Timber Design Awards.

The London Design Festival celebrates design in its many guises and one of the stand-out pieces among 200 original projects in 2008 was a ‘wooden eye’ outdoor pavilion by David Adjaye, one of Britain’s leading architects.

The name of the place with which this Australian landmark is synonymous is the result of a spelling mistake – a curiosity surpassed by the strength and endurance of the historically significant and well-loved Coffs Harbour Jetty.

The weatherboard house has been part of the Australasian landscape since European colonisation, but has been losing market share to monolithic cladding systems. However, that may change with the launch in New Zealand of a sophisticated new solidwood system.