A house for Alan Saunders must be comfortable, formal and refined, and flexible for entertaining guests. It would endeavour to reflect himself, enabling a privacy secluded from the public eye and also maintaining a state of worldly presence and opinion.
The house would embody a journey toward the ‘reveal’, manifesting a gesture of movement and a fusion of compartments. It manifests a series to piece him together, through a questioning of the complexity in identity? In fragments he reveals a piece of interest, and a philosophy, in his transcripts.
The planning and formal composition explores the uniting of a compartmentalised concept, as spatial events moving one ‘realm of being’ to the next. Upon entrance are stationed private areas, and parts nestled in earth underpinning the concealment of his private life. Zoned within a diagonal shaft, rising the contour determines the guest and main bedroom with private courtyard and framed views. The plan begins to establish a dynamic presence beyond the curved wall, formed as though conversing to turn away from its contour. It also directs an entry gallery and movement through the house. Saunders who reveals a love of the haptic experience and holistic nature of cathedrals informs a decision to heighten the spaces with double height views and ceiling penetrations, creating an awareness of the landscape and sky by movement through the house to the eventuate in an unveiling of the landscape in the curtain wall glazed living arrangements.
The entry also gestures dynamism toward the upstairs mezzanine, in its curved rustic embodiment contains a work area and library projecting out in the ‘public realm’ and outdoors to a loft space. It is this stem of the house which then projects beyond and falls slightly with the contours in an inviting and entertaining living arrangement of 180 degree view. And as for the food critic: a gourmet kitchen to dine, with immediate link to a fresh garden planting. For the philosopher: the term ‘living’ may literally be challenged in the arrangement of the living space; but is it not a life to be lived in the presence of others; as an open, opinionated public figure, there lies an exposed dwelling only experienced by those closest.

interchange