Home-grown Australian styles are hard to find. There’s the Queenslander house with its wide verandahs and stilts, and further south the Federation house. But Noosa, on the Sunshine Coast, is the birthplace of what may become Australia’s first internationally recognised ‘style’. Noosa style is very much our own, but it has other elements. There’s perhaps a bit of a Japanese feel, maybe a hint of Art Deco, certainly Santa Fe and it also has all those vibrant colours of Mexico. Peter Davies, the ‘father’ of Noosa style, uses the colours of the environment in his concrete artefacts. He creates panels, plaques and pots on a seaside theme – they feature shells, swimmers, mermaids, gaily coloured fish, sailing boats, animals and flowers. The objects have a childlike simplicity and innocence, and maybe that’s why they’re so popular; they remind Australians of carefree, happy times spent at the beach when they were kids. Don visited Peter in his modern, colourful studio, which was designed by Gabriel Poole. It has timber verandahs on three sides, and is set in a tropical garden planted with ginger, cannas and jasmine.
How the artefacts are made
Peter carves many of the original artefacts out of Hebel, a lightweight concrete which is well suited to wall-mounted relief murals. A silicon mould is made and then concrete is poured in and left to set. Peter thinks that the climate and the intensity of the light in Noosa calls for the use of strong colours. When the objects come out of the moulds they are either sand blasted or coloured with imported oxides that have become his signature: terracotta from Mexico, aqua from Mombasa and blue from Zanzibar.
Further information
Artefacts made by Peter Davies are available at the Sandbag Studio, 777 Noosa Eumundi Road, Doonan, or phone (07) 5471 0744 for mail-orders. Prices start at $3. Small geckoes cost $85, large geckoes are $185, wall panels are priced from $240 and pots range from $12-$500. The book mentioned in our segment is Noosa Style by Jackie Jarratt. It is published by the Blue Group, rrp $39.95.