Not near it, not visiting it on weekends; on it, in it, shaped by it in the way that only happens when a landscape is just the place where
your life occurs rather than somewhere you've chosen to be. I left to study architecture, worked in other places for a while, and eventually
came back; to farm again, east of Guyra, with my own family now. That return felt inevitable in a way I couldn't have articulated when I was
leaving. It feels even more inevitable now, having spent years thinking professionally about buildings and the places they inhabit. Coming
back changed how I understand my own practice. Not in a dramatic way, more like finding the right word for something you've been trying to
say for years.
Growing up rural means you understand seasons before you understand almost anything else. Not seasons in the abstract, not the ones described in tourism brochures or painted on calendars, but seasons as something that happens to you. The particular cold of a New England winter morning at 1,000 metres. The way a frost sits in the low ground and the high paddocks stay clear. The angle of winter light that is genuinely, measurably different up here than it is on the coast or in the city. I understood all of this before I had any reason to think about it professionally. Which means that when I did start thinking about buildings; about orientation, thermal mass, how a house performs across a year rather than on a single temperate day, I wasn't learning abstract principles. I was finding language for things I already knew.
I knew house a house performs in this climate before I had a professional reason to care. That matters more than I initially gave it
credit for.
Architecture that responds genuinely to its climate and landscape requires more than knowing the right numbers. It requires a kind of felt
understanding, an instinct for what a building needs to do in order to actually work for the people living in it, through the seasons
they'll actually experience. That instinct is hard to develop from the outside. I didn't have to develop it. It came with where I grew up.
There is plenty of building happening in the New England region. What there isn't, quite so much, is building that actually responds to
it. Drive through the tablelands and you'll see houses that could have been built anywhere; on the coast, in the suburbs, in a display
village somewhere south of Tamworth. They sit on the land without much conversation with it. No particular acknowledgment of the altitude,
or the cold, or the way the winter sun moves at this latitude. No sense that the building has paid attention to where it is.
I don't think this happens out of carelessness. It happens because most of the design decisions that shape a house (particularly at the
volume end of the market) are made far from here, by people who have never stood on this specific piece of ground in July. The result is
buildings that are technically adequate and contextually nowhere. What the New England landscape actually asks of a building is fairly
clear, if you're paying attention. It asks for materials that hold heat; thermal mass that earns its keep through a winter that is genuinely
cold, not just cool. It asks for orientation that takes the low winter sun seriously, not as an afterthought but as a primary generator of
how the building is arranged. It asks for a relationship with the land that goes beyond the visual; a building that sits in a paddock as
though it belongs there, not as though it was delivered and set down. A building that knows where it is. Something that looks like it always
planned to stay.
This is what I started Frost Architecture in Design to make, five years ago. Work that is specific to this place, to this altitude, this
climate, this landscape, this community of people who have chosen to live here and deserve buildings that acknowledge that choice. Five
years in, that intention hasn't changed. What I'm more aware of now is how much the work depends on finding the right clients for it; people
who are building here because they genuinely love it here, who want a home that responds to the place rather than ignoring it, and who are
willing to let the design process take that seriously.
Those clients exist. I've worked with some of them. I'm looking for more. If you're building in the New England region and you want a building that knows where it is, I'd like to hear about it.
