Budget Breakdown: An Aussie Architect Builds a Beach House With Million-Dollar Views for $270K

Matt Goodman had been keeping an eye out for vacant blocks along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, Australia, for years.

The architect and his wife, Corrie, hail from Wollongong on Australia’s east coast, although they’re based in Melbourne and they often holidayed in the  small nearby towns of Separation Creek and Wye River, drawn to their simple lifestyle and similarity to the coastline where they grew up. Building their own beach house in the region was a long-held dream.

Such was their connection to the locale that in December 2015, when a wildfire tore through the area, Matt felt compelled to step up. He put word out through local businesses, offering to help residents who had lost their homes rebuild. "It was around the same time that I started my office and I didn’t have a lot of work—and then instantly I had three pro bono jobs," he recalls. "I was busy, but still not making much money." 

The silver lining was that the pro bono work gave Matt valuable insight into the landscape. When vacant blocks popped up for sale, "I was able to weed out whether a site was good, or too difficult, or too expensive," he says. "I had knowledge that I could put into our own build, so that we could try to do it for a song."

In 2018 they secured a "perfect" site on a hill overlooking the ocean, but their budget for the build was just $400,000 ($250,000 USD). "We knew the house needed to be compact and simple and cost-effective," Matt says, "but we also wanted it to be a beautiful space where the experience of being down there, surrounded by nature, was really intense."