Matt Goodman had been keeping an eye out for vacant blocks along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, Australia, for years.

The architect and his wife, Corrie, hail from Wollongong on Australia’s east coast, although they’re based in Melbourne and they often holidayed in the small nearby towns of Separation Creek and Wye River, drawn to their simple lifestyle and similarity to the coastline where they grew up. Building their own beach house in the region was a long-held dream.

Such was their connection to the locale that in December 2015, when a wildfire tore through the area, Matt felt compelled to step up. He put word out through local businesses, offering to help residents who had lost their homes rebuild. “It was around the same time that I started my office and I didn’t have a lot of work—and then instantly I had three pro bono jobs,” he recalls. “I was busy, but still not making much money.”

The silver lining was that the pro bono work gave Matt valuable insight into the landscape. When vacant blocks popped up for sale, “I was able to weed out whether a site was good, or too difficult, or too expensive,” he says. “I had knowledge that I could put into our own build, so that we could try to do it for a song.”

In 2018 they secured a “perfect” site on a hill overlooking the ocean, but their budget for the build was just $400,000 ($250,000 USD). “We knew the house needed to be compact and simple and cost-effective,” Matt says, “but we also wanted it to be a beautiful space where the experience of being down there, surrounded by nature, was really intense.”

Matt drew inspiration from the area’s ’50s and ’60s beach shacks: small, humble dwellings made with fiber cement sheeting. “They’re often just rectangular footprints, so they’re fairly easy to build, and they’re on stilts, so they’re dealing with the slope in the simplest way,” he explains.

Embracing the same spirit of economy and practicality, he designed a contemporary two-bedroom version clad in fire-resistant corrugated iron, hovering over the slope on steel stilts. “We kept the footprint as tiny as possible—it’s just 91 square meters,” he says. “The bedrooms are tiny and the ceiling heights aren’t huge, but we did things like using full-height doors and full-height tiles to make the space feel more generous.”

$405,000 Land	$27,000 Site Work	$15,000 Foundation
$67,000 Structural	$20,000 Wall Finishes	$6,000 Flooring
$19,000 Roofing	$2,000 Hardware	$14,000 Electrical
$37,000 Plumbing	$5,000 Landscaping	$15,000 Kitchen & Bath Fixtures
$5,000 Lighting	$45,000 Cabinetry	$5,000 Countertops
$15,000 Appliances	$37,000 Windows & Glazing	$9,000 Doors
$6,000 Tilework	$6,000 Metalwork	$25,000 Furnishings & Decor
$55,000 General Contractor Fee	$3,000 Demolition	$5,000 Waste/Debris Removal
Grand Total: $848,000 AUD ( $516,800 USD)

That set the stage for the home’s star detail: a wall of glass that doesn’t so much frame the view as immerse you in it. With glazing for the project racking up $37,000 ($22,000 USD), it was the only true splurge, says Matt.

The couple’s strategy was to save with cost-effective materials such as laminate joinery and fiber cement sheeting, and to spend on a few key details, like the window. Even so, they ended up stripping out many “extras.” For instance, they had hoped to wrap the bathroom in bluestone, but they swapped the material for plain porcelain tiles to cut costs; a hidden roller blind for the front window was also scrapped. “By the time we were halfway through construction, we were so broke that every decision was cost-driven,” Matt admits. “There’s a handful of power points and downlights that we deleted to save money that we now wish we had.”

Matt also did the internal painting himself after baulking at a $15,000 ($9,000 USD) quote, but he says in hindsight, he’d fork out for a professional job. “Painting raw plasterboard is terrible, and we had just three days to get it done before the joinery went in,” he says. “We were basically camping on-site—and our daughter, who was one at the time, had chickenpox, so it was the biggest disaster weekend!”

While their carpenter sourced the blackbutt timber for the combined island bench and dining table at the beginning of the project—a blessing given costs skyrocketed during the pandemic—Matt says the custom piece still felt like a splurge at $5,600 ($3,350 USD). It paid off: the couple and their two young daughters Eadie, three, and Daisy, six months, now spend much of their time together there.

“Looking back, if we had done it any other way, or changed to a cheaper material, the project would’ve been worse off because of it,” Matt says.

It was a valuable lesson learned for future client projects, too. “Doing a few things well is really important to the office now,” Matt says. “If everything feels cheap, the whole house will feel cheap—but if the things that you actually touch feel really refined then the whole house will feel refined, even if a lot of it was done on a budget.”

Despite the concessions, Matt says that spending weekends in their new beach shack is “brilliant.”

“You feel like you’re floating, surrounded by the trees and the birds,” he says. “There’s no TV in the house, so we have music on, and you can switch off and focus on the black cockatoos that have landed in the tree, or listen to the hum of the ocean. Being surrounded by nature, hearing it...it’s so beautiful it makes you want to get out into it.”

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Project Credits:

Architect: Matt Ross Goodman / @mg_ao

Builder: Basebuild Constructions

Structural Engineer: Simon Anderson Consultants

Cabinetry: KDS Cabinets

Custom joinery: Darcy James Design

Landscaping: JALA Studio