Australian architecture studio Wood Marsh has designed the Ocean Grove Surf Life Saving Club to emerge from the surrounding sand dunes on the southern coast of Australia, near Melbourne.
Built on the footprint of a previous building, Wood Marsh designed the clubhouse to greatly expand the facilities for the surf life saving club in the town of Ocean Grove.
To hide the increased mass the studio sunk the two-storey into the surrounding sand dunes, which the studio said gave the building its form.
Wood Marsh designed the Ocean Grove Surf Life Saving Club
"The design approach is derived directly from its location on the rugged Australian coastline, set within the surrounding dune system," said Roger Wood, director of Wood Marsh.
"The robust materials draw strongly on contextual influences as well as the need to be durable," he told Dezeen. "It is a cohesive programmatic response to provide a place of interaction with the waterfront for the incredible life-saving volunteers and the community of Ocean Grove." The surf life saving club sits within sand dunes
Designed to look like a single storey structure from the sea and surrounding beaches, the clubhouse has a curved timber-clad upper floor above a concrete base.
The lower floor of the building contains the majority of the club's functional spaces including its changing rooms, surf life saving equipment storage, patrol room and ambulance parking that has direct beach access.
The building has a con...