Project Feature | Casa Bicheno Pool Villa

That instinctive exhale. The moment the door opens, we want guests to feel the weight of their everyday life melt away. The Pool Villa was designed to create an immediate sense of calm - natural stone, spotted gum, layers of linen, and that gentle, rippling light that bounces off the pool and floods the interiors. It's a space that greets you quietly but powerfully. Refined, but never intimidating. We wanted the first impression to feel like arriving at a beautifully resolved version of your dream home by the sea.

Bicheno has this extraordinary, untamed quality: granite boulders, silver-blue sea, light that shifts in a way that's completely its own.

We didn't want to compete with that; we wanted to be in conversation with it. The palette inside is drawn directly from this landscape - the warmth of spotted gum echoing driftwood and dry coastal scrub, the cool of natural stone mirroring the granite coastline, and the soft neutrals of linen that move with the breeze. Large, glazed openings blur the line between inside and out, so as you sit at the dining table or sink into the sofa, Waubs Bay is always part of the room. The architecture frames nature like a living artwork – bliss!

The guiding principle was that lighting should never announce itself - it should simply make everything feel more beautiful. We wanted guests to move through the villa across a full day and feel the atmosphere shift naturally with them, from the bright, open clarity of morning light to something much warmer and more intimate by evening. Layering was everything: task, ambient, and accent working together so there's always a sense of depth and intention, never a flat overhead wash. Three words? Warm. Considered. Alive.

Light is what brings materiality to life. A ceramic pendant with that slight imperfection of hand-thrown craft, lit from within, becomes something sculptural and deeply human in a way a flat ceiling fixture simply cannot. The rattan and timber pieces cast the most beautiful, patterned shadows in the villa’s core - organic, moving geometries that add warmth and texture throughout the day and night.

We were deliberately drawn to Australian makers because their work carries a sensibility that feels entirely at home in this landscape. There's an honesty to the materials - nothing trying too hard - and the lighting honours that. It catches the grain of the spotted gum, the curve of a ceramic glaze, the shadow of a woven pendant, and elevates the whole interior into something more considered and cohesive.

Intentionality in flow was everything. The Pool Villa unfolds across three levels in a way that creates both togetherness and retreat - there's generous, open-plan living and dining that naturally draws people together, and then quieter, private spaces where someone can curl up with a book or steal an afternoon nap.

The pool is the beating heart of the home; positioned so it's visible from the kitchen, the dining area, and the deck, it keeps people loosely connected even when they're doing their own thing. The sunlit deck is sized for a yoga mat or two at dawn or a long, lazy breakfast that stretches into lunch. And the sauna - that ritual of heat and cold, plunge and rest - is one of those rare things that gets a whole group to collectively exhale together. With our architect, Gillian, we designed for that. For lingering. For the hours that pass without anyone noticing.

It's one of our fave things about The Pool Villa - the way it shifts entirely after dark. By day it's luminous and airy, flooded with Bicheno's extraordinary coastal light. But as the sun drops over Waubs Bay and the sky turns that deep Tasmanian indigo, the villa becomes something altogether more intimate.

The pool glows from within, casting that liquid shimmer across the ceilings and walls. The sculptural pendants take on a warmth they don't quite have in daylight. Corners that were open and bright become softly shadowed and cocooning. It moves from sanctuary to something closer to theatre - effortlessly, without anyone touching a single switch.

Casa Collection began with a deeply personal vision - to create stays on Tasmania's east coast that felt genuinely considered, from the architecture down to the last detail of a linen fold. The Pool Villa is the newest and most ambitious expression of that vision, and in many ways, it feels like the collection has reached a new chapter.

What's next is about going deeper, not necessarily wider - continuing to refine the experience, to strengthen our relationships with the remarkable local makers, producers, and community partners that give Bicheno its soul, and to ensure that every guest who stays with us leaves with something they didn't quite expect: a real connection to this place. The east coast of Tasmania deserves that kind of care, and we intend to keep giving it.