Mori House
Mornington Peninsula
A holiday house of 2023 at Mount Martha on the Mornington Peninsula, designed from Lisbon by the Portuguese architect Manuel Aires Mateus for Jeff Provan, founder of the Melbourne development group Neometro, and his wife Mariko, with the Richmond practice MA+Co as executive architects. One cruciform gesture divides the corner block into four gardens, each with its own job: vegetables, an enclosed courtyard, a pool and lawn, and mixed native and European planting. The house is poured concrete through and through, board-marked walls with softly curved corners and polished floors, Oregon Douglas fir wherever concrete is not, and the entry court is an olive grove. The stair in this picture is one of two sculptural concrete stairs climbing to a rooftop belvedere over Port Phillip Bay.
Provan set the rules himself: a beach house rather than a permanent one, with no painted surfaces, no plasterboard, no downlights and no shower screens. There are no hallways; rooms open straight into one another, a tatami room sits near the centre, and slits in the concrete ceilings cast cross-shaped light that moves with the day. Aires Mateus described the ambition as creating the ruins of the future. The house, carrying Mariko's family name Mori, took a commendation for new houses at the 2023 Victorian Architecture Awards.
Aires Mateus
The Lisbon practice of Manuel Aires Mateus, running two offices in the city. On this house he was the concept designer working from Portugal, and he gave the owners the credit: in his telling Jeff and Mariko designed the house, and the practice was only helping the process from the side.
MA+Co
The Richmond, Melbourne practice of principal and owner Karen Alcock, founded in 2008 and previously known as MAA. On Mori House it was the executive architect, translating the concept design from Lisbon into a built Australian house.
Architecture and design Aires Mateus (@_airesmateus), Jeff Provan (@jeff_provan) and @ma_co.au. Photography Brook James (@brookjames_). Seen via @thedesignfiles.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched August 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.