The Phillip Island House

This house was built between 1983 and 1990 on a remote headland of Phillip Island, Victoria, and was designed to connect with the surrounding landscape by hugging the shoreline and cleverly disappearing into a sand dune.

Barrie Marshall is one of the founding partners of the multi-award winning international architecture practice Denton Corker Marshall, established in 1972. Marshall designed the experimental Phillip Island House as his family holiday house and took eight years to complete its construction.

This house is entirely personal... it is a combination of medieval walled world and spare modernist edifice linked to nature and embracing the visual spectacle of its surrounds. From the ocean it registers as an abstracted black line, from the land it disappears into the the scrubby landscape, and from the sky...it is hard to spot. In knowing what he didn't want, Marshall created something, in his own words, 'quiet and elemental with no architectural form on the outside.

'Karen McCartney, 70/80/90 Iconic Australian Houses: Three Decades of Domestic Architecture

• Interview

Scroll through a selection of photographs below to see details from the house designed by Barrie Marshall. Photographs by Michael Wee for the publication 70/80/90 Iconic Australian Houses by Karen McCartney.