Located on the pristine Mornington Peninsula, Pt Leo Estate emerges from an ambitious, years-long shared vision to merge food, wine, and sculpture with the rare beauty of Victoria’s rugged coastline on the site of an established vineyard.

Contextually framed by the dramatic rural property, the forecourt’s sweeping, generous geometric planes evoke the wide, open spaces of the regional Australian landscape and pay homeage to the curvature of a specially commissioned Inge King sculpture situated at its centre. Proving an organic counterpoint, an asymmetrically placed mature Bottle tree forms a lone piece of landscape among the expansive brushed concrete driveway.

Itself a sculptural response, the waved concrete form of the building and contemporary entrance forecourt creates an abstract representation of wine pouring from a bottle. Responding to the curved forecourt, the interior entry, cellar door and restaurant are arranged on a radial plan and celebrate a dynamic day-to-night transition. Throughout the day, the angle and orientation of the roof allows sunlight to filter gently into the building from the north while capturing long-ranging vistas of the vineyard and coastline towards the south.

In the evening, large steel light beams evoke the bracing of a wine barrel emit a simple glow and craft a more intimate sense of scale. A refined of material palette of oak panels and steel emphasise the central wine barrel theme, simultaneously adding warmth and acoustic absorption for an accessible, human-centred experience of space.

The sculpture park wraps around the built form, an intermediary in the view between the architecture, vineyard or ocean. Home to Australia’s largest collection of privately owned sculptures, the park follows a meandering pedestrian path through the property that equally celebrates the artists and the natural beautify of the property.