‘Touch the earth lightly’: the Australian home that floats above the landscape

The house teaches you things, Lynne Eastaway says. Today, a choir of cicadas fill the scrub with a rhythm that rises and falls. On other days, there may be visits from birds, goannas, echidnas, wombats, wallabies and kangaroos. “The bush ends, and the house begins,” she says. “You’re not the centre; you’re just part of it. That’s the thing you learn. “Western life has forgotten that we’re not above nature. It can affect us and we can affect it too. Living here has been a wake-up call to living life.”

‘Touch the earth lightly’: the Australian home that floats above the landscape. The house teaches you things, Lynne Eastaway says. Today, a choir of cicadas fill the scrub with a rhythm that rises and falls. On other days, there may be visits from birds, goannas, echidnas, wombats, wallabies and kangaroos. “The bush ends, and the house begins,” she says. “You’re not the centre; you’re just part of it. That’s the thing you learn. “Western life has forgotten that we’re not above nature. It can affect us and we can affect it too. Living here has been a wake-up call to living life.” This is the kind of thing that happens when you live in a house designed by the pioneering architect Glenn Murcutt. Eastaway’s house – known usually as the Ball-Eastaway House – on the 10-hectare block of dry sclerophyll forest north-west of Sydney, was built in 1...