Australia in the 1980s

Lost in the thick undergrowth of the New South Wales bush, Richard Leplastrier’s 1975 Euladan House at Bay View, demonstrates that steel need not be a rigid, rectilinear material, but something infinitely softer and more harmonious. As Oscar said of his church in Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Oscar and Luanda, “It is what they call prefabricated. It comes in pieces. It has nuts and bolts and so on.” ¹ It is no coincidence that Lucinda should be Lucinda Leplastrier, for there is acknowledgement in the book “to Richard Leplastrier (without whose help the building of the church would never have begun).” ² Drawn out along the north-facing slopes of Church Point, overlooking Pittwater, Leplastrier’s Euladan House (Figure 3.45) is a series of pavilions, framed in steel, glazed to the north and roofed in rolling “galvo”. Each part of the building is a separate domain – family, parents and children – linked by a stepped and staggered corridor which curtails through-vistas and ensures both continuity and privacy. Thus the house follows the topography, weaving along the hillside and falling, with it, down towards the natural harbour far below. The structure is a series of looping, portal frames, spanning the whole width of each domain. The boarded timber ceilings (Figure 3.46) run shy of the steel frame and extend, as a continuous plane, from one end of the volume to the other. The effect is that of being inside the upturned hull of a boat washed deep into the bush.