I knock on the front door of Cal Somni, but there’s no answer. It feels like the kind of place where you don’t knock anyway. You just arrive. There’s a car in the driveway indicating someone’s presence so I wander along a redbrick path toward a garden pavilion, its doors wide open with quiet invitation. Beyond the pavilion, the murmur of a creek calls my attention into the bushland where Nigel Chouri and Crick King emerge barefoot, fresh from a swim.

At Cal Somni (“place of dreams” in Catalan), water is a constant companion. There’s a tidal creek behind, the Tweed River across the road, and the Pacific Ocean roaring just beyond the mangroves against the shores of Dreamtime Beach. And with the water table just 28 inches below the surface, Cal Somni doesn’t just feel like it’s floating—it practically is.

Nigel and Crick purchased the 1950s beach shack online in 2020 from their apartment in Barcelona, where they had lived for the past 20 years designing hotels, hospitality venues, and culinary experiences. They wanted to live closer to family, and they decided on Fingal Head, a narrow peninsula in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, Australia. But the couple soon realized that Fingal Head was too remote, too quiet compared to the bustling social rhythms they’d grown used to in Spain.

Within their first year back, they relocated to nearby Murwillumbah, purchasing a forever home that aligned with their creative and professional aspirations (including a boutique inn and bathhouse project, The Somni Inn, now awaiting council approval). Cal Somni became a weekender, a more casual counterpart to their main residence, and this allowed Nigel and Crick a looser and more intuitive approach to its renovation.

Rather than demolishing the existing main house and garage shed, Nigel and Crick embraced the challenge of working within the combined footprint of 1,280 square feet, preserving the character of place while adapting it to their needs. “We didn’t want to erase its past,” says Nigel. “We just wanted to help it breathe differently.”

$1,400,000 Land	$14,000 Site Work	$1,200 Foundation
$32,000 Structural	$48,000 Wall Finishes	$4,000 Flooring
$16,000 Roofing	$2,650 Hardware	$7,800 Electrical
$9,400 Plumbing	$12,000 HVAC Equipment & Solar	$34,000 Landscaping
$7,500 Kitchen & Bath Fixtures	$12,000 Lighting	$18,500 Cabinetry
$7,500 Countertops	$13,000 Appliances	$24,000 Windows & Glazing
$14,000 Doors	$14,000 Tilework	$4,500 Metalwork
$28,000 Furnishings & Decor	$140,000 Labor	$16,000 Demolition
$11,000 Waste/Debris Removal	$3,800 Window Awnings
Grand Total: $1,894,850 AUD (Approximately $1,233,453 USD)

With the two disconnected structures, the couple sought to create one unified and livable space, both physically and emotionally. Nigel and Crick looked back on their well-travelled history to find the answer—the Spanish plaza. A generous courtyard demarcated by recycled brick acts as the connective tissue between the two buildings: an outdoor living room for social gatherings.

The feature space of Cal Somni is its garden pavilion, formerly a single-car garage. It’s not an office, a studio, or a bedroom. It’s a flexible space without a predefined use, meant to inspire whatever purpose you assign it. “People are curious about it,” says Crick. “There’s an expectation that every space within a home has a defined purpose, but here, you get to decide in the moment.” If you’re not reading a novel or doing yoga in the pavilion, most visitors find themselves perched on its cantilevered timber deck in conversation with those sitting in the plaza. This deliberately transitional zone draws on Japanese influence, acting as an engawa—an in-between space connecting indoor living with the natural environment.

With their background in design, Nigel and Crick are no strangers to building—but finding collaborators who understood their intuitive, on-the-fly process was important in shaping the outcome of the project. “We needed people who weren’t thrown off by the fact that the plan wasn’t 100% locked in,” Nigel notes. The renovation unfolded incrementally with the help of Cameron Parr from Radius Gardens and Taurey Witsel from Bare Build, who both proved to be vital creative partners, helping bring new perspective and improve upon Nigel and Crick’s ideas. “Taurey didn’t blink when we said we were figuring it out as we went. He trusted our instincts, and that made all the difference.”

Practicality and resilience were major priorities, especially given the site’s proximity to so much water. The team devised a set of flood mitigation strategies incorporating discreet but clever details. “We knew flooding was part of life here, so rather than fight it, we designed for it…It’s all built to bounce back.” All power points are installed four feet above floor level, ensuring that even in a major flood, the electrical system stays safe. Insulation also begins at that same height. The team used moisture-resistant cement board instead of plasterboard for the walls, and each wall floats two inches above the slab. In a flood event, the owners can simply pop the skirting boards off the wall and mop, squeegee, or brush the silt, mud, and water through the narrow opening to the exterior.

One of the biggest challenges during the renovation was the original slab. Because the main house was built on sand just 28 inches above the water table, over time, the flooring had cracked and shifted due to subsidence. Solving it wasn’t straightforward. Nigel and Crick lost four companies along the way, each unwilling to tackle the complexity of the repair. Rather than replace the entire slab, they cut it into three sections to stabilize the foundation—a major undertaking that chewed a significant portion of the renovation budget but was essential in securing the home’s future structural integrity.

Sustainability was also a guiding force. Wherever possible, the team reused materials or sourced options with minimal impact. “We wanted the land to breathe,” Nigel notes. “Every material choice was about impact—what could we reuse, what could we avoid, and how could we tread lightly.”

The slatted timber benches near the entry and in the plaza are made of salvaged studs from the original structure, tying together the practical with the poetic. Concrete paths were replaced with native plantings to encourage permeability and habitat. Runoff from the pavilion’s roof flows directly back into the water table, continuing a motif of fluidity. Cal Somni breathes with the seasons, inviting its inhabitants to do the same.

More Budget Breakdown stories:

They Turned a Shed Into an Off-Grid Island Home for €257K

An Aussie Architect Builds a Beach House With Million-Dollar Views for $270K

Is This $590K Rhode Island Home “Too California?” Not for Its Owners

Project Credits:

Interior Design: Nigel Chouri and Crick King, Blankslate / @weareblankslate

Builder/General Contractor: Taurey Witsel, Bare Build

Lighting Design: Nigel Chouri and Crick King, Blankslate

Landscape Design: Cameron Parr, Radius Gardens