An award-winning house in the Noosa hinterland began with a tentative question from the man who dreamed it up, architect Dan Sparks.
"One of the first questions I asked the owners??? before I had any drawings but I was considering this possibility of a tent house, was if they liked camping," Sparks said.
"Luckily they said yes."
The house, which sits beneath dramatic sail-like structures at the edge of dense rainforest near Doonan, has earned Sparks Architects the Regional Project of the Year award at the 2017 Sunshine Coast Regional Architecture Awards.
Sparks said the house itself was a simple, elegant box with cross ventilation in every room and a series of moveable roofs under the large fly roof.
"It has sliding glass doors so when it's all opened up it feels like you are on a platform in the middle of the rainforest," he said.
The owners, a couple and their two young children, love the engagement with the environment their tent house allows - "a permanent state of camping," as the regional judges called it.
'Walls and ceilings dissolve into carefully crafted openings, leaving nothing but the ethereal fly roof, sky and the surrounding rainforest site," their official statement said.
Three tallow wood trees were felled for the building and all this timber went into bespoke fittings and joinery in the house.
Sparks said he had first been exposed to, and inspired by, the tent house idea working with the noted Queensland architect Gabriel Poole who had explored the idea in the 1990s.
Sparks' tent house, which featured recently on television's Grand Designs Australia, now advances to the state architecture awards.
A purpose built semi-enclosed house at Little Cove by James Russell Architect was named Sunshine Coast House of the Year.
"They're both really interesting houses because they have a similar overlay but from a different angle," chair of juries Alice Hampson said.
Hampson said the Mitti Street house was on a hemmed in position without ocean views, "so James has created his own landscape inside the home and then used the reference of the rainforest beyond.
"Out the front of the house he's also made a landscape of the mesh fence and wires attaching to the house.
"So he's made the entire house a bit like a tent, and he's made the landscape within that."
Other award recipients included Sunshine Coast University Hospital, by Architectus Brisbane and HDR Rice Daubney as Sunshine Coast Architects, which received the Gabriel Poole Award for Building of the Year.
Noosa Nest by Tim Ditchfield Architects, NCC Early Swimmers by Conwell Architects, Side House Project by Sparks Architects, Breezeway House by majstorovic architects, Richard Henry by K Architecture and Currimundi Beach House by Conrad Gargett all received regional commendations.
All regional award recipients progress to the Queensland State Architecture Awards to be announced in Brisbane on June 23.
