On our last day in Tasmania, Antoinette and I trucked on down to Peppermint Bay to visit one of the apple isle’s, ooooh, two? bits of architecture. Ken Done was there but we didn’t let it spoil our day.

The bar and restaurant, designed by Terroir, lies about fourty minutes south of Hobart and sits just off the the highway overlooking Peppermint Bay. A bay exhibiting all the traits of that Very Tasmanian Condition of the rural picturesque - rolling hiils, a meandering river - in this case the Derwent, glimpses of remote farmhouses, lonely fishing boats and the constant and very real threat of scones.

A timber clad, cranked ramp is the primary organisational device, connecting the entry to the gardens beyond as well as separating the restaurant and bar from the kitchen and amenities.

Perched on the ramp is an alternating, counterform roof that rises to give space for the restaurant and bar, compresses over the ramp and rises again to accomodate the kitchen’s venting. This roof in tandem with the internal ramp, gives the building its street cred as a landscape proposal (they are slopey, like the land…)

The undulating shell-like volumes may be read as an abstraction of the landscape across the bay; singular and silent. While it is the ramp and its gentle meander into the gardens, past a regimented herb garden, twisting and folding its way into a (stagnant) water feature that promotes the appreciation of the landscape as a good place for a stroll.

It is a similar tactic to one that Terroir are employing on a much larger scale for a proposed eco-resort at Coles Bay on the Freycinet Peninsula where the shell forms echo the Hazards beyond, while a zig zagging garden winds its way down through the cabins.

While landscape and spatial dynamism are at the core of the formal characteristics of this project, I would speculate that at Peppermint Bay, Terroir are also flashing a cheeky grin to the Sydney Opera House. The shell-like forms and the applied vertical detailing over the glazing - presumably to mediate glare - comes across like a warped and flattened version of said opera house’s northern foyers.

Perhaps most exciting is the realisation on closer inspection that this is a relatively inexpensive building, that this is the first work by a young practice that is attempting to squeeze whatever it can out of limited means. Material choices throughout are pragmatic rather than extravagant - the roof is a standard profile, the glazing a standard shopfront - and the guts of the building, its garbage bays, vents and gravel parking lot are left out in the sun warts and all.

Despite this the lasting impression is one of spatial invention and an architecture that is rich with ideas.

The pizza in the bar is quite excellent too…