Concept design for restaurant and guest accommodation.

Pearl Beach lost its only restaurant to fire, and with it a gathering place that had shaped the village for decades. The site sat empty, but the memory of what it held didn't. I started in the archive: black and white photographs of golden-era summers, families on the sand, the old kiosk. Then I walked the site, over and over, and mapped the four very different groups who use this place.

The concept word was LINGER. Everything flows from it: a spatial sequence that drifts from the energy of the restaurant to the quiet of the guest rooms, architecture drawn from Sydney School bush modernism, materials chosen to age the way sandstone ages, a palette taken from the bush, the rock and the weathered timber of the old beach structures. Not a restaurant with rooms; a gathering place rebuilt from its own story.