Timeless Mid-Century Home on the Great Ocean Road

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Step Inside This Architect’s Timeless Mid-Century Home on the Great Ocean Road

Produced in partnership with Broadsheet
Photography: Caitlin Mills
Styling: Georgina Jeffries

When architect Josh Crosbie saw Trade Winds for sale in Lorne, he took a massive gamble to buy the mid-century masterpiece. In partnership with KING, Broadsheet goes inside Trade Winds for a tour.

Every time Josh Crosbie drove along the Great Ocean Road, he’d look up at the same point – to a house on the clifftop. Or “my house”, as he liked to call it, even before it was.

“It’s just gorgeous,” he tells Broadsheet. “A long, slender, black rectangle with a strong roofline and repetitious mullions that go the whole way across. Every second window has an upper awning portion, which sets up this playful language that dances its way down the length of the place. It was honestly my favourite house on the whole Surf Coast but I’d never been inside.”

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Crosbie has a passion for nature and the wilderness, having been a rock climber and alpinist his whole life. So when he established Josh Crosbie Architects in Lorne 10 years ago, he found that the raw Surf Coast energy suited not only his outdoorsy lifestyle, but his professional outlook.

“Our niche here has become really complex projects, driven by the challenges of the majority of our sites,” he says. “We work on a lot of sites that other architects have been chewed up and spat out of, but those complexities are where our passion lies.”

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Captured on the Great Ocean Road.

Being in the architecture business, he’d keep a close an eye on local real estate listings. So when the house, named Trade Winds, went up, he rang the agent and said he’d be there in five. “I thought, holy shit, that’s my house!” he says.

Inside, he was blown away by the 1965 build. “I was just so relieved that it was Mickey Mouse original condition and non-bastardised,” he says. On a whim, he and his partner listed their own place and sold it by mid-week – meaning they’d staked everything on Trade Winds. “We negotiated pretty hard, but if we hadn’t managed it, we would have been homeless,” he says.

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What’s so special about this mid-century beauty? First off, when you walk through the front door, just beyond the sand-coloured carpet is a full facade of windows for an incredible ocean vista. “We quickly learned about the history of the place and it was Lorne’s premier party house in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s,” he says. “The stories are legendary, which is lovely because we love entertaining, so it’s come full circle.”

The mid-century modern design movement was a reaction to the fussy Victorian and Edwardian periods, but it fell out of favour in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Right now, though, it’s enjoying a revival. Trade Winds is filled with MCM inside touches, including the ornaments, such as the large collection of groovy West German vases that Crosbie inherited when he bought the joint. The interior furnishings of Trade Winds also receive delicate attention from Crosbie, who already had a KING Neo Sofa, but has also now made the KING Jasper the centrepiece of the light-filled lounge room.

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The Jasper is a modular sofa and can be customised with timber finishes, fabrics and European leathers. Crosbie has a generous three-seater, but the size is adjustable with modules able to be added or taken away. It’s also Crosbie’s main concession to making Trade Winds a home that’s kid-friendly (other than the three-storey treehouse outside). The sofa takes on more of a modern design, which is an on-going theme throughout the house – a balance between MCM and modern when it comes to both the furniture and the finishes.

This balance between the two eras crosses over though in Crosbie’s commitment to ensuring everything in the house is built to last. “Mid-century modern was the last period where everything was done as a craft,” he says. “It’s those natural textures like hard woods and stones, the clean straight lines, the minimal forms, the appreciation for open plan. There was much more consideration going to flow and function, and an improved connection to outside with the landscaping.”

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This ethos could not be more in step with Crosbie’s practice. His firm works with homes that are respectful to their surroundings, tending towards natural textures like hardwood claddings, rammed earth walls and stonework. They’re often 70s beach houses, which need a lot of salvaging to retain original features such as exposed timber and hardwood. Considering the house to be “sacred”, he began restoring the exposed rafters and facade. There were plenty of new touches too, which incorporate more modern elements but in keeping with the flow and form, such as a storage room, studio with ensuite, and landscaped terraces.

“To me, a successful project is one that is simulated with a landscape really well and ideally can't even really be seen,” says Crosbie. “I personally find the overdevelopment of the Surf Coast, with massive trophy homes, really sad.”

Crosbie believes in letting textures and forms do the talking.

Trade Winds is the antithesis of these showy mansions. Considering its structure to be ‘sacred’, he didn’t want to visibly add more. So the new storage room and a studio with ensuite are kept hidden beneath the existing floor space. “And then I’ve made the new doors and windows facing east, where they're not visible from the road below,” he says.

“The couple who owned it didn’t have children themselves and you could say the house is designed for empty-nesters,” he says. “These sofas are open and sprawling, and lovely to lie down on. [The Jasper is] a big 90-degree angle, and I just love that it sits up off the ground a little bit, so despite it being quite a large couch, it gives it a very lightweight appearance.”

Crosbie thinks it’s the Jasper’s timeless design that really aligns with his own company’s values. “We like to let textures and forms do the talking,” he says. “You can’t go wrong with the palette of those natural materials. Superficial design can age a bit and it's lacking in integrity.”

With a house holding such a legacy, the little details are as important as the overall build.

“I very much see us as the custodians of this gorgeous place,” says Crosbie.

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