A Waterfront Family Home With a Modern Garden and Landscape Design (House Tour)

Gordons Bay House by Secret Gardens and Milieu Creative is a waterfront family home with the perfect modern garden and landscape design to match.

Perched on a steep incline in picturesque Gordons Bay (Sydney, Australia), a tiered landscape and garden design from Secret Gardens sees the outdoor spaces match the uncompromising and site-specific house they surround.

A passion project of sorts for Secret Gardens founder Matt Cantwell, the brief for the waterfront family home was simple but demanding in its own right. “The garden and landscape design needed to complement the architectural style of the waterfront family home, but the clients also wanted something unique and confronting,” Matt explains.

Working within the inherited footprint, the project saw the architectural and interior renovation of a previously closed-off home, in which Davina Bester of Milieu Creative injected a sense of warmth and connection to the site through materiality, openness and key texturally refined elements to create the new waterfront family home for the clients, her brother Aidan and wife, Aleks.

Opening up to its ocean view overlooking Gordans Bay, the connected living, dining and kitchen space welcomes in the waterfront views and the aural and aromatic additions that come with it.

Achieving a balance of intimacy and ambition, a feat made all the more impressive by the project’s inherent challenges, Secret Gardens have created a dramatic and textural modern garden and landscape response to the site and the home’s architecture.