A dark room set into the garden

The Tasmanian Garden Studio is a compact charred-timber room set into a native rain-garden, made to recede by day and glow at dusk.

Everything is gathered into one room: a bed, a wood heater and a run of full-height glass, with a board-formed concrete plinth that steps the floor out into the planting and doubles as bench and threshold.

It's built to be lived in lightly — heated by a single fire, cooled by cross-flow through the sliding glass, and grounded by the ferns, banksia and kangaroo paw that press right up to the walls.

The brief began with something already on the ground — a concrete slab hard-stand left in the back garden from the property's earlier life. Rather than break it up and pour again, the studio was set to build on what the site already held.

So the footprint is drawn straight from that slab. The plan is moulded to its edges and the walls land where the concrete already meets the earth, so the garden is disturbed no more than the day the hard-stand was first laid — a found foundation put back to work, with less waste, less excavation, and a building that sits exactly where the site asked for it.

A dark little building that disappears into the garden by day and glows through it by night.Saxon Hall