Mori House, a concrete coastal retreat on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, is a project that rewards a slow look. Completed in 2023, this off-form concrete residence at Mount Martha marks the first Australian building by Portuguese practice Aires Mateus.
The house unfolds as a loose cluster of pavilions set out on a roughly cruciform plan, carving the grounds into four distinct gardens: pool, lawn, olive grove, and vegetable patch.
There are no corridors, so each space opens directly into the next, allowing a multigenerational family to gather or scatter as the mood dictates.
Overhead, slender cross-shaped skylights slip blades of light through the concrete ceilings, shifting in intensity as the day turns.
A Blend of Cultures is evident in the design.
The material story is deliberately spare: off-form concrete poured in situ, natural timber, and little else. No painted surfaces, no plasterboard, no downlights.
Character comes instead from proportion, texture, and the slow drift of light across raw concrete—the restraint that has defined Aires Mateus for decades.
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Japan runs quietly through the whole project. “Mori” means “forest”—and, fittingly, it’s also Mariko‘s family name.
A tatami room sits near the centre of the plan, while the broader approach borrows Japanese ideas of stillness, simplicity, and careful spatial sequencing.
A sculptural concrete stair climbs to a rooftop belvedere with long views across the bay and the gnarled tea-tree setting below. Manuel Aires Mateus has said, “Architecture is an incomplete art, only finished by the life that fills it”—a line that lands squarely here.
For all its monolithic presence, Mori House was conceived as a “forever house”: a relaxed, shoes-off beach shack rendered in concrete and built to hold a family for generations.
As the project comes together, it’s clear that the collaboration itself is what makes it sing—an internationally revered architect, a considered local practice, and a design-led developer, drawing Portuguese restraint, Japanese quiet, and the Australian coast into one coherent whole.
Monumental and intimate at once—and already recognised with a Residential Architecture commendation from the Australian Institute of Architects—Mori House is a beautifully argued case for architecture built to last.
The architecture of Mori House is a great example of how different cultures can come together to create something truly unique and beautiful, much like the Japanese restraint seen in other designs.
