A small building for one of South Australia's most remote lighthouses.
Cape Willoughby sits on the easternmost tip of Kangaroo Island, home to South Australia's oldest operational lighthouse. The 174-year-old tower once guided ships through Backstairs Passage during the early days of the colony's coastal trade, and its surrounding precinct - the lighthouse, the keepers' cottages, the walking trails - has long been a destination for visitors making the trip to the eastern end of the island. What it lacked was a contemporary point of arrival: somewhere to gather, learn, refuel and shelter from the wind before exploring the rest of the precinct.
We have designed a new cafe and information centre that will serve as the precinct's primary point of contact for visitors, housing the tour operations of National Parks and Wildlife Service South Australia alongside a cafe, gallery, retail and public amenities. The new building will be constructed on the footprint of the former cafe, adaptively reusing the steel structure of the original building that remains in place on the site. Working within the existing footprint avoided new excavation and earthworks - an important decision in a conservation zone where every disturbance to the land is one worth questioning.
Drawing from the lighthouse, designed for the coast.
The form of the building takes its cues from the precinct around it. The white rendered cottages and the lighthouse itself contribute to the character of this place, so the new building's exterior palette echoes that white finish rather than arbitrarily contrasting it. Where the cottages have pitched roofs and the lighthouse rises tall, the new cafe stays low and contemporary - a quiet, single-storey form that sits below the skyline rather than competing with the buildings that defined this place before.
The most distinctive element of the design is its facade. Cape Willoughby is home to a first-order Fresnel lens - a piece of 19th century optical engineering that was once the cutting edge of light-source technology, and remains on display as part of the visitor experience. The lens's striking shell of prismatic glass elements inspired the louvre-like facade of the new building, drawing a direct visual line between the artefact inside and the architecture that houses it. Inside, in deliberate contrast to the white exterior, dark-stained plywood lines the walls - immersing visitors in the picturesque coastal views and creating an atmospheric backdrop to the artefacts on show in the gallery and museum space. Limestone sourced from the site will be used to form retaining walls and battered edges along the access pathways, grounding the new building in the material of the place itself. Construction is being delivered by Kangaroo Island builders Kauppila and is expected to complete in mid-2026.
