Daylesford Longhouse

I came here on a very windy day and noticed about seven species of local animals that were attacking anything that could grow. Ones that bounce and ones that fly and ones that burrow and ones that nibble, and in a very polite way, I then started to imagine how people who were committed to making a farm and a garden could infact flourish in such an unlikely place.

We're one and a half hours away from Melbourne, we have risen in height so our exact site is called Elevated Plains. We're on a ridge and I understand that we're above gold mines. The arrival is scaled so that you arrive in a sense in a very ambiguous hall that is not optimised for the car but then has all the potential of being ambiguously used for as they say weddings parties anything. Off that huge portal we've got the animals on axis in one direction and the garden and the people on the other side.

Our research centered on how in other societies at other times the agricultural model of super confining the fecund part and therefore being able to leave most of the landscape as it was, had not only an age of efficiency but also when it comes to the example of Palladio a potentially beautiful democracy, in the sense that the Palladian villa had the stores, the people who looked after the farm, the owners of the estate, the art collection, the machinery all in one magnificent building. Palladio built very beautifully so that then the net rationale is a lot of people had a lot of contact with beauty a lot of the time.

The fundamental principle of establishing a greenhouse cleans up a number of key things. One is wind protection, the other is a level of amenity all year round and the incredible thousand square meterage of roof gives us a massive water harvesting device, which allows us to hold that water and not have the soil dry out really quickly.

Usually, people seem to leave here somewhat changed whether it be through that sense of wonderment and delight or having experienced something different or that connection with nature and the ability to kind of decompress. It doesn't have one big idea, it has a collection of small aggregate ones.