Cabin 2 by Maddison Architects "grows out of the land" to win Australian Timber Design Awards

Best new residential building: Cabin 2 by Maddison Architects embodies the idea that a house can be landscape. Photo: Will Watt

Rooted among the Mornington Peninsula's melaleuca trees, Cabin 2 embodies the idea "that a house can be landscape", according to its architect, Peter Maddison. With blackbutt plywood floors and stringyback internal lining and cladding, the Blairgowrie building that "grows out of the land" won the best new residential building at this year's Australian Timber Design Awards, announced on Thursday.

Maddison's landscape metaphor complements the house's dominant building material. Indeed we regularly invoke allusions to timber when we describe the city as the "built environment" and the street having a "fine grain". Optimistically, it perhaps suggests a renewed appreciation for this precious yet richly diverse natural resource.

Today we prefer to express the materiality of the grain and its natural colour and are less likely to paint or mask our weatherboards. Preservatives can maintain a particular shade of spotted gum brown or jarrah's almost black red or it can be left to weather and go permanently grey. In Maddison's case, he chose to lime the stringybark "to take the honey-colour out and to make it all softer on the eye".

The interior of last year's award winner, the Fairhaven residence, employed just one timber. It was as if the house had been carved from the heart of the tree itself. Architect John Wardle exposed blackbutt's subtleties: its clear fine grain, its lack of knots and its consistent colour. "It's often more powerful to use one material purposefully and strongly, rather than having a series of materials that need to compete," he says.

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Consistency is also at work in the House in the Woods, which gave Wilson Architecture this year's award for best renovation. On a large, heavily forested block in Donvale, the architects integrated the interior spaces with the landscape.

"They used spotted gum's durable nature as decking and carried it through inside for continuity," says Stephen Mitchell, sustainability program manager from the Timber Development Association. "It's the same timber, just polished inside."

Timber's ability to withstand the elements is rated on a durability scale from one to four. Hardwood timbers such as iron bark and spotted gum are class one timbers that last longest. Coating timbers can protect them from moisture impregnation and fungus.

"In Victoria, where the environment is not as tough [as Queensland], it's cooler and there's not so much sunlight so you can get away with lower durability timbers when you use them externally," says Mitchell.

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Cabin 2 by Maddison Architects "grows out of the land" to win Australian Timber Design Awards