Bokey Grant Wedges a Brick Lookout Tower into a Flame Zone Escarpment in the Southern Highlands

The site for EA House had reportedly sat untouched since 1890, written off as unbuildable. It is a cliff edge above a gorge near Mittagong and Bowral, on Gundungurra Country, and it carries Flame Zone, the most severe bushfire rating Australian building regulations recognise. Most architects would treat those facts as a list of problems to engineer around. Bokey Grant treated them as the brief. The result is a 170 m² family home for four bedrooms that reads, from a distance, less like a house than like a piece of infrastructure the national park forgot to label.

What interests us is how narrow the design's vocabulary is. There are three materials: insulated double brick tinted to match the rock, concrete for the plinth, bridge and stairs, and spotted gum lining the living level. There is one formal idea, which the architect calls a lookout tower that blends into its setting. The plan is wedge-shaped: its north face presses as close to the escarpment edge as practical and its south side fans out. That restraint is not minimalism for its own sake. Every decision has to answer to fire, weather and a rock face that does not forgive improvisation, and the house is better for it.

A Tower That Wants to Disappear

The architect references two very different typologies: the watchtower and the concealed bunker. Seen from the canopy, both readings hold. The brick volume rises clearly above the eucalypts, but its planted roof and rock-coloured walls stop it from asserting itself against the ridge. It is visible without being loud, which is a harder balance to strike than either full camouflage or full display.

The green roof does more than soften the silhouette. On a hilltop exposed to wide temperature swings it works as thermal mass and insulation. In a bushfire zone, a planted roof is also a far less combustible top surface than the timber or metal you might expect on a rural house. The roof makes the house quieter in the landscape and tougher at the same time.

The Bridge Does the Heavy Lifting

The 18 metre concrete bridge is the project's quiet structural thesis. It carries people, and it also carries every service into the house, so the slope below never has to be trenched, cleared or retained. According to the project team, no trees were removed. On a sensitive escarpment, a single slender connection is a far gentler intervention than a driveway cut into the hillside.

The detailing keeps the bridge light: thin steel balustrades, a single globe lamp, a deck that hovers over lichen-covered sandstone. In fog it becomes almost ceremonial, a long approach that delays the house and frames the act of arrival. The concrete plinth at its landward end doubles as parking, so cars stay on solid ground and the dwelling itself stays car-free.

Double Brick as Armour and Camouflage

Double brick is an unfashionable choice in contemporary Australian residential work, where lightweight framing dominates. Here it earns its place. Insulated masonry gives the house thermal inertia against highland cold and summer heat, and it gives the fire resistance a Flame Zone site demands. The brick colour was matched to the local rock, so the walls read as a continuation of the escarpment rather than an object placed on top of it.

The elevations show Bokey Grant's stated interest in tall, vertical faces punctured sparingly. The east elevation carries just two apertures, and corners are cut by deep recesses rather than broad glazing. A concrete bay projects over the boulders like a lookout platform. This is architecture that treats openings as a scarce resource, which on a fire-rated site is exactly what they are.

Thresholds Cut from Solid

The best moments outside are the transitions. A brick-paved porch steps down to a square opening in the wall that frames the hills like a viewfinder. It is a small move, but it rehearses what the interior does at larger scale: compress, then release onto the gorge. Young gums and sandstone boulders are left right up against the walls, which tells you the landscape was given priority over any neat curtilage.

A Living Level Wrapped in Spotted Gum

Below the entry, the plan opens into an extruded kitchen, living and dining space lined in spotted gum on walls, ceiling and floor. The contrast with the masonry outside is total. Where the shell is hard and protective, the interior is warm, continuous and slightly cave-like. Spotted gum is a native hardwood with good fire performance, so even the softest surface in the house is answering the site.

Exposed beams and a single freestanding stove give the room its rhythm. The windows here are much larger than anywhere else in the house, and because you reach this level only after a sequence of narrow, controlled spaces, the views over the gorge land with real force. The children playing by the glass in these images are a reminder that this is a family home first, not a gallery for the landscape.

The Hearth as Room Divider

A wood-burning stove sits between the living area and the kitchen and dining zone, separating them without a wall. Stacked firewood becomes a plinth, a piece of furniture and a seasonal display in one. It is a traditional rural device, used here with discipline, and it lets one long room hold several moods.

The deep window seat in figured timber panelling may be the most generous detail in the house. Because the brick walls are thick, every opening produces a reveal deep enough to inhabit. A child can sit inside the wall and look into the trees. This is where the bunker reading turns domestic, and it shows how mass can create intimacy when it is handled with care.

A Monastic Bedroom Floor

The upper level, which you enter first, arranges four bedrooms along a single-loaded hallway that ends in a picture window. Some writers have compared this floor to Le Corbusier's La Tourette, and the comparison is fair in spirit: repeated cells, controlled light and a corridor that works as a contemplative spine rather than leftover space. Stairs and services cluster where the plan widens to the west.

The concrete stair, with its plain white handrail, is detailed with almost institutional restraint. Small square windows keep you oriented to the bush without giving away the main view. The descent is deliberately quiet, so the timber room below arrives as a reward.

Small Rooms, Controlled Light

Bedrooms, bathrooms and transitional spaces are kept small on purpose. The yellow-tiled bathroom adds a flash of colour that the masonry and timber palette otherwise withholds, and it suggests the house is not as austere as its exterior implies. Doors that open onto the paved porch keep inside and outside close, even when the openings themselves are modest.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings make the logic clear. The site plan shows how little ground the building takes up, roughly 120 m² of footprint according to published accounts, among scattered trees on a large hilltop. The entry plan shows the triangular wedge, with bedrooms lined up along the corridor and the long bridge running out to the parking plinth. The lower plan sets the narrow living volume tight against the contours, with a covered outdoor area tucked into the slope.

Why This Project Matters

Australia is building more and more homes in high bushfire risk landscapes, and most of the results are either fortress-like boxes or conventional houses with compliance measures bolted on. EA House argues for a third path: let fire rating, terrain and climate define the form from the start, then refine that form until it carries meaning. Double brick, a planted roof, an 18 metre services bridge and a single native hardwood are not exotic choices. Pulling them together under one clear idea is the achievement.

It also shows that a so-called unbuildable site may simply be a site that had not yet met the right brief. Working with builder Armstrong Residential, Bokey Grant has produced a house that touches the escarpment lightly, keeps its trees and still gives a young family warmth, retreat and a front-row view of the gorge. We would like to see more rural housing measured against this standard.

EA House by Bokey Grant. Southern Highlands, New South Wales, Australia. 170 m². Completed 2026. Photography by Clinton Weaver.

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