Fleurtys Café and Farm Walks
3866 Channel Hwy, Birchs Bay
The brief required a setting for a new 40 seat café adjacent to a commercial cut flower farm in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel district, forty kilometres south of Hobart. The café was developed to complement the productive enterprises already occurring on the farm.
Key objectives were:
- to provide access through the farm property to the café,
- provide parking and visitor access to the cafe
- to develop a pleasant setting for the café that encouraged visitors out to enjoy the bush and farm experience
- to provide accessible walkways to the café and from there to nearby parts of the farm, including an annual art trail
- to emphasise the connections and interaction between the farm and natural bush setting.
By setting the café (‘urban’) between the forest (natural) and farm (rural) parts of the property, we encourage consideration of the relationships, tensions and interactions between these land uses, an especially important consideration in the Tasmanian context, where the interfaces are often fraught - politically, socially, biologically and economically.
By drawing (luring?) visitors from the comfortable café into an easy forest walk, we can create opportunities for interpretation of natural values, (botanical, geological, zoological) and set up challenging counterpoints between natural experiences and rural and artistic endeavours.
Fleurtys water management is self-contained - it generates no off-site wastewater, collects all its own rainwater, and surface runoff is redirected into natural absorption areas within the bush and farm areas.
Plant selection for all plantings around the café landscape and in regeneration areas was based on local selections only, often from seed collected onsite and propagated on the farm.
To enhance local biodiversity by providing small, permanent water bodies near to the café and on the margins of previously cleared farmland, and to use bird-attracting native Tasmanian species in plantings on the farm walks and adjacent to the café.
Susan Small Landscape Architects
more on this project (PDF)
