When Max Pritchard’s clients approached him to design a small house overlooking a picturesque creek on their farm, they never imagined that he would perch them above the waterway, but they’ve come to love his lofty solution.

As they approached retirement, a string of serendipitous events led the owners of this steel house in South Australia, to build a new home on a bridge, spanning a winter creek on their 20-hectare hobby farm.

“My husband’s parents owned the farm for 20 years and planned to retire there, but when they went to build a house, they couldn’t get power across the neighbour’s land, so they bought a house in town,” the owner says. “That was our good fortune because after we’d been looking for a while for our retirement property, we offered to buy into the farm. It’s a very pretty spot with the winter creek running through it.”

The couple run sheep on the property to reduce the fire hazard, and alpacas to protect the sheep. The three undulating paddocks and the creek banks are dotted with massive River Red Gums, while prickly Kangaroo Wattle bushes provide a haven for native birds. The farm also boasts an orchard, vegetable patch and chooks to eat the scraps. The only thing missing from their rural idyll was the house.

After Adelaide architect Max Pritchard met the clients to discuss their initial ideas, he put forward an outlandish suggestion. “We’d chosen a site with a view of the magnificent gum tree near the billabong, and thought Max would perch us on top of the bank,” the owner says. “But that site is south facing, so Max swung us right around and across the creek, to get a north-facing aspect.

Pritchard’s radical proposal aimed to circumvent several problems associated with the clients’ original site. “I thought it would destroy the little valley formed by the creek that the new house looks into,” he says. “There is also a requirement that you have to build 25 metres from a water course, and I felt that a house in that position would be too remote, but I thought if we were able to overcome those obstacles we could get a good result.”

Throughout the lengthy approval process, Pritchard remained convinced that his design could be built cost-effectively and without damaging the unique site. “It’s nearly 20 years since I designed my own house in Adelaide, which is an elevated steel structure,” he says. “The technology of the welded steel frame is much the same, although my house was a little larger, so the spans were longer. This is a far more economical structure because it’s small, due to budget and space requirements.” Once they secured planning permission, construction was relatively straightforward, with the limited material palette and the simplicity of the narrow plan making this an easy house to build. “Geoff Overall, the fabricator, manufactured the steel frame in large sections in his workshop in Adelaide, and it was transported to the site by truck,” Pritchard says. “It was craned into place in a couple of days, which is one of the big advantages of building with steel.”

“The concept of touching the earth lightly is very appropriate in this situation,” Pritchard adds. “For a building to only touch the ground at four points with four relatively small concrete pads that are bedded onto rock, it’s a very minimal intrusion on the contours of the site.”

The steel frame was instrumental to achieving that lightness, Pritchard says. “It would have been very hard to use an exposed truss in any other material that would economically span that distance.”

The cladding is Fielders Kingklip 700 made from COLORBOND® steel in the colour Windspray® and the roofing is Fielders Spanform 700®, also made from COLORBOND® steel and also in the colour Windspray®. This offered several benefits. “We had a relatively low pitch on the roof, and the Kingklip offers economy and a pleasing aesthetic for the box within the steel frame: it’s a very simple roof,” Pritchard says.

“We also wanted it to be non-flammable, and I like the patterns of light and shade that you create by using a profiled steel sheet. I also like the fact that it relates to traditional rural building forms.

“It also helps that once the steel frame is in place, the rest of the house can be sealed up by one tradesman,” Pritchard adds. “The roofer was able to clad the whole building in a short time, which made it easier on the clients.”

While it was a challenging site, the simplicity of the structure and the ease of its assembly using steel components made the task of overseeing construction relatively easy, Pritchard says. “Owner-builders are not necessarily used to dealing with tradesman, and some of the more traditional tradespeople might have thought that the design was a little crazy, which is a typical reaction,” he explains. “A lot of people understand it, but some are bemused by the idea of living above the creek.”

The clients are convinced it was worth it.