Designers at Home | Robbie Walker
Robbie Walker’s off-grid family home blends raw materials with refined design. Built to weather the elements and embrace daily life, it’s a powerful reflection of place, purpose and resilience.
Some homes are drawn on paper, others are wrestled into place by the person who dreams them. But before ideas of Besser brick construction and exposed plumbing took hold in designer and builder Robbie Walker’s mind, there was a piece of land on a hill outside Mansfield in Victoria’s High Country, where skies stretch and weather arrives without warning. This isn’t just a place where Walker built his family’s home – it’s a place that defines his identity.
“I bought the block to be close to Mount Buller,” says Walker. Mount Buller is Australia’s most accessible alpine park and a ski resort known for its slopes and breathtaking terrain. It’s where he spent his youth, developing a passion and, eventually, a career. “I used to be a professional snowboarder, and that mountain was a massive part of my life. It’s where I met my wife – she was a really good skier. But to get a place up on Mount Buller you have to be a millionaire, and I knew I’d never afford that. Mansfield House was my way of being as close as I could. I was so lucky to be around the snow when I was a kid, and I wanted to be close to Buller so I could give my kids the same opportunity.”
Walker’s connection to the land wasn’t just emotional. It became a functional driver behind every design decision. He spent months exploring the hilltop site, taking in the light, the wind and the weather patterns. To fine-tune the views, he went as far as building timber frames to mock-up where the edges of the house would eventually sit. What emerged is a house that feels like it belongs as much to the landscape as to its designer. The northern side of Mansfield House is open and sunlit – the living areas are wrapped in floor-to-ceiling glass, drawing in long-range views across Taungurung Country. Mount Buller sits there, a sentinel on the eastern horizon, while to the west, golden light spills across Lake Eildon.
For Walker, the choice of robust, industrial materials wasn’t just an aesthetic decision – it was about designing a house that could absorb and support family life. The concrete floors, block walls and plywood ceilings haven’t been placed there to intimidate or impress guests. They are there for the muddy boots and the indoor footy games and all of the inevitable chaos that comes with raising kids. “Everyone always asks what it’s like to design and build a home for yourself, or without a client,” says Walker. “But I did have a client. I had four clients – my wife and children – and they probably would’ve preferred a bit more carpet, to be honest. But they love it. And as they’re getting older, I think they appreciate it more. The big living room and all those hard surfaces were designed so they could be kids, to kick the footy inside without us stressing about it.”
This choice to build tough was shaped by Walker’s experiences in the family’s previous home in Melbourne, a house with freshly painted walls that quickly bore the scars of everyday family life. “Within six months, there were red Sherrin marks all over the walls and ceilings,” he says, laughing. “We only lived there for a year, but I had to get the whole house repainted before we moved out because it was just destroyed.” Here, in Mansfield House, the materials tell a story of resilience and of a house built not just to look good but to live well. There’s no paint, no plaster or marble, and no frills. It’s just concrete, ply and glass, combined in a way that feels both spare and deliberate – and beautiful, of course.
Out here, your house can’t just be aesthetic; it has to perform. “You get everything up here,” notes Walker. “It’s freezing, it’s howling or it’s boiling.” Solar heat gain in winter, vented heat distribution, passive cooling drawn from the concrete core – every system plays its part in making the home liveable year-round. Waking up here isn’t like waking up anywhere else. Living off-grid in the High Country means each day starts with a gentle – or not so gentle – nudge from the environment, a reminder that life in this house is a conversation with the elements. “It’s something I know everyone says,” he admits, “but it’s so true … being in the country, and especially being off-grid, you really have to care about what the weather’s doing.”
There’s no climate control or choosing an ideal temperature at the click of a button. Instead, there’s the sun pouring through the expansive glass at first light, or an icy wind rushing up from the valley below. “If it’s going to be sunny, even if it’s cold outside, I know the living room will warm up,” says Walker, “so I go through the house and turn on the transfer fans to suck the warm air from the living room into the bedrooms.” Alternatively, if the forecast is looking bleak, he will light the fires early, using the home’s thermal mass to hold and radiate warmth.
These daily rhythms have become part of the joy of living here. The hands-on, day-to-day awareness of light, air, temperature and time brings with it a kind of quiet satisfaction that’s hard to find elsewhere. Walker compares it to camping, being physically in tune with the world around you. “It’s nice to be busy being alive,” he reflects, though admits that the self-sufficient lifestyle is not always as romantic as it sounds. The plunge pool perched on the hill’s edge, though well-loved by the kids, has turned Walker into what he jokingly calls “the classic grumpy old man with a pool”.
Heated via a hydronic system connected to the home’s fireplace, it’s a labour-intensive set-up requiring full-day commitment. “You have to get the fire going just hot enough to move the water but not so hot that it boils,” he says. “If the kids want to swim by 6am, I’m lighting fires at 11am.” It’s a fitting endnote for a home built on balance: between simplicity and ambition, between designer and family man, between wild weather and warm interiors. The reward is not just a comfortable home but a deeper connection to place, weather and the simple mechanics of living comfortably.
For Walker, Mansfield House is the sum of years of quiet experimentation, combining elements he’d played with on smaller projects across the 10 years before its completion. “My dream since I was a teenager was just to have a cool house,” Walker recalls, “but I always assumed I wouldn’t have much money, so I’d always been interested in finding ways to use simple, affordable materials and doing my best to make them look good.”
While the materials are simple and utilitarian, and of good value at the time of construction, what elevates the house is the design sensibility behind them. Scale, proportion and detail give the home a quiet strength that belies its budget-conscious origins. The result is a home that feels powerful – not due to luxury finishes but because of Walker’s belief that good design is about application, not cost. There’s a quietness in the way it sits on the hill, a stillness earned not through minimalism for its own sake but through an intimate, hands-on understanding of place, material and need. For Walker, the project is both a sanctuary and a personal benchmark – a place where hard-won lessons in design, building and life in the High Country come together under one simple roof.
Building design by Robbie Walker.
- 项目文案：Aaron Chapman
- 项目摄影：Brook James
- 转载自：The Local Project
- 图片@The Local Project
- 语言：英语
- 编辑：序赞网
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