
Prior to site pictures and information, as well as relevant research such as wind directions, my initial idea was to base my room spaces around a central outdoor living area, and I played with various layouts in the thumbnail diagrams on the right. The point of the central outdoor living area was to bring everyone together into a communal space from their private spaces.

My second concept played with the idea of having 3 bedroom spaces (or 3 spaces for that matter) connected via outdoor balcony. I assumed that the wind was coming front on so I wanted to expose the spaces accordingly for ventilation purposes.

Still concerned with a front-on wind flow, I excluded the balcony in between the rooms and instead joined the rooms at corners. I also pondered the idea of having cocoon shaped bedrooms, with the idea that a curved wall could catch wind from any direction.

Here I developed my cocoon idea into a more structural form, proposing a louvre window and an air vent above, creating air flow. I also started to develop a plan layout shown in the top right, with the 3 bedrooms lined up diagonally and a living/kitchen room at the rear, all sitting on decking. At this stage I was concerned with space placement in terms of the SE-NW prevailing winds which we discovered at the time.

More sketches of the last plan layout concept....

Developed further.

My last concept idea consisted of a 'barramundi fish' layout, as Guenter so eloquently put. Again, I was perhaps too concerned with plan layout in accordance to the SE-NW wind flows. Nevertheless, the idea was that each bedroom (shown on the left of the layout) would have its own private balcony space, and the curved eaves above each room would catch rain and be filtered through a gutter down the back wall of the room and under into a water tank. Guenter also raised the point of 'silly spaces' (dont quote me on that), such as the sharp corner to the right of the kitchen area, which would not only be hard to construct, but also pointless in a sense that there would be no need to go in such a confined, sharp angled wasted space. I guess this seems to be a bad habit in much of my development ideas in design projects. Nevertheless, you live and you learn of such things.