Marie Short House: Glenn Murcutt

Glenn Murcutt's Kempsey farmhouse is a six‐hour car journey north from Sydney through towns and state forests. One turns at last from the major highway onto a regional road that is less and less groomed and the final approach is a long bumpy track. Signposts only just mark the slow dusty drive through mature forest where enormous eucalypts suggest the age and locale of this landscape. A gate or two in farm fences at the road's end reveals almost nothing. It is only by opening a gate and stopping to look closely, that far off a small structure of perhaps two horizontal houses is visible. Through a large paddock one reaches another gate leading directly to a silvered timber building hovering on a lawn. Drawing close, stopping just past the house, arrival is at an open‐ended porch.