That afternoon at Heide we wandered around the grounds that were once a farm. Inside the modernist house the limestone walls glowed pale pink, butter yellow or deep orange depending on their orientation to the low winter sun. The 1967 house, now a sparse gallery, was built when bohemians John and Sunday Reed outgrew the old farmhouse, now known as Heide Cottage, thirty yards up the hill and obscured behind rambling garden beds and some ancient spreading trees. Almost sixty years later the design brief for the building has been fulfilled: that it should ‘... have a sense of mystery and weather over time to take on the appearance of a ruin in a landscape’. Indeed, it now recalls the white walls of Eucla's abandoned telegraph station. At age ten I had visited a similar house at the edge of a forest, disappearing with the occupants’ children into the trees; and the clean-lined modernist building seen from the distance was a low white cave radiating soft yellow light in a dusky steel sk
Recipes and ruminations from a small house in a big city.