Blok Belongil: A New Benchmark in Modular Beach House Design by Blok Modular and Vokes and Peters
Blok Belongil, a modular beach house in Byron Bay, is an innovative project born from the collaboration between Blok Modular and Vokes and Peters, and it stands as a testament to the evolving possibilities of modular architecture. Located within a council-mandated coastal erosion zone, the project’s design needed to be both relocatable and resilient.
Blok Belongil embraces its unique site constraints by integrating these requirements into a design that challenges the conventions of suburban housing. Leveraging their deep experience in modular construction, Blok Modular—renowned for their human-centric design approach—partnered with Vokes and Peters to create a boutique hotel-inspired compound that feels more like bespoke, site-specific architecture than a prefabricated structure.
The result is a cohesive, thoughtfully planned home that uses sustainable materials, maximizes views, and adapts beautifully to its surroundings. This project sets a new benchmark for what modular architecture can achieve, demonstrating that prefabrication can be innovative, contextually responsive, and of the highest design and construction quality.
Photography by Christopher Frederick Jones, Published with bowerbird
Can you describe Blok Modular?
Blok Modular are a team of architects and builders who share a passion for human-centric design and construction innovation. We believe in the power of good design to change people’s lives in profound ways – the way we relate to each other, our environment, our community, and ourselves.
Can you describe the design for Blok Belongil? What was it like collaborating with Vokes and Peters on this project? How did the design evolve through the concept and documentation?
Blok Belongil is a new modular beach house designed and produced in collaboration between Blok Modular and Vokes and Peters. Blok and Vokes and Peters have collaborated on over 70 projects over 7 years and have created award-winning architecture over several projects. It is an honour to work beside them.
Blok Belongil demonstrates the agility and sustainability of volumetric modular building procurement to respond to its setting and client brief, and offers an alternative to the typical suburban house planning diagram. We found that thinking critically about the appropriate building typology allowed us to overcome the shortcomings of a suburban house plan organisation as a place for extended social gatherings of extended family and friends. A boutique hotel as a project ambition helped direct our thinking towards a compound building with a series of connected but discreet parts, both internal and external, roofed and unroofed.
Knowing the coastal erosion zone and triangular site constraints, how obvious was it that modular was the preferred design and construction method? What were the advantages to this approach?
The site sits at the end of a dense subdivision of suburban lots, in a council coastal erosion zone which requires all construction to be modular and fully relocatable if erosion reaches within 50m of the house.
The project was installed in one day, and designed to be disassembled in a similar timeframe, able to be fully relocated in the event of coastal erosion or sea level rise. (The local council planning controls require this). The project is building code and planning compliant, and built to the highest construction quality standards.
We used statutory setbacks to generate a triangular plan at the centre of the site. The absence of fences allows one to imagine the ground plane of the site continuing to the horizon (extreme Shakkei – Japanese borrowed scenery). The plan is
hollowed out to hold a remnant of the dune at its centre. It is a compound building defended at its external walls like a ship washed up on the dunes, which pulls the surrounding landscape into its centre.
The form, layout and finish seem more like bespoke site-specific architecture than modular design. It looks so seamless. Were there any key challenges encountered during the design and construction phases? and how were they addressed?
We first arrived on site and were struck by a rich layering of constraints and opportunities – suburbia to the west, a train line and the mountains to the south, a roundabout, views to the lighthouse on Point Byron, and a panoramic ocean view across the dunes to the north but with a carpark full of camper vans in between.
We realised that this would be a house on the edge of suburbia that would function very differently from a typical suburban nuclear family house, so we drew a line at the west boundary and asked ourselves “are we making a building that is part of suburbia or part of the broader set of civic and cultural icons?”
Rather than the typical suburban response to defend territory with fences and edit the less desirable aspects of a site by generating a bias in the site plan, this building is setback equally from all boundaries creating a triangular tower. It’s monolithic form made almost entirely from Tallowwood, resembling a kind of modern ark washed up on the dunes.
The house is conceived as a boutique hotel – mentally relabelling rooms (reception vestibule, lobby lounge, restaurant, private garden, guest suites etc) for our clients, their young adult children, and other adult friends who will spend time with them in the house.
What lessons from Blok Belongil can be applied to future modular projects to push the boundaries of prefabricated architecture?
This project was a demonstration that modular construction does not need to be limited to rectangular forms, long, skinny buildings, or plagued by lower design and construction quality. It shows that we can be ambitious about form, and deliver nuanced architectural responses to setting, human occupation, relationship to landscape, cultural narrative, complex client briefing, and budget.
It succeeds in setting a new benchmark for the modular construction industry, and proves to the architectural market that they can have uncompromising architecture that is built in a factory, in a streamlined process that controls cost, and significantly reduces time frames.
We believe that Blok Belongil makes a significant contribution to innovative procurement models for architectural housing, and will shift the perception of prefabricated housing, increasing market share. This is critical to allow modular construction infrastructure to reach a scale where automation becomes feasible, driving cost reductions and in turn making a real impact on housing affordability. Modular procurement allows accurate cost control from concept design stage, and develops more efficient, sustainable building practices.
We see modular construction, and particularly the integration of factory built custom architecture as the future of housing, and therefore good urban design, good neighbourhoods, and good societies. With further development into this technology, high quality design should be accessible to all.
