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Brookwater Apartments responds to an emerging and strong desire to re-connect with nature in an authentic way. It is a project about place-making and community rather than building making.

Back dropped by spectacular forest covered mountains and lushly vegetated rolling hills, the proposal is conscious of creating both a community and a place of retreat, a community which is focused on relaxation and rejuvenation, being in touch with nature and reconnecting with self.

Proposal concepts are sensitively considered and located in a manner where a sense of the environment and landscape and the life it supports is embedded in the experience of the place. Traditional place making strategies are employed which includes arranging the buildings and other spaces in response to the form and character of the landscape, such as fairways, clumps of trees and water bodies, and constructed outdoor places of retreat, such as semi enclosed terraces or loggia.

Major design moves and interventions; The principal design elements represent complementary counter points; void and solid; which aid legibility and understanding as well as give unique and memorable experience to all principal spaces. They are achieved through deeply recessed and very private outdoor spaces and natural coloured rendered walls with simple cost effective forms.

The major and signature gesture for our design is the proposal for the development to read as a collection of smaller buildings. The apartments are expressed in staggered forms which step and turn through the landscape. This reduces the perceived size and breaks down the mass of the building to a more intimate and human scale, less institutional and with a sense of exclusivity.

The construction of these buildings are to be in conventional materials with natural colours and with strong articulation of screens and sunshades has many levels of experience from the powerful and exciting address it provides on approach, to the sense of anticipation in arrival particularly at entry and then subsequently as part of the continuing experience to the interiors.