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“Suspended 40 meters above Fairhaven Beach, the Pole House is one of Australia's most iconic homes. Recently renovated, The Pole House now adds a luxurious modern setting to a holiday experience like no other. Whilst carefully planned and crafted, The Pole House is not about accommodation, nor is it about facilities or amenities, of which it has many, The Pole House is about the experience.

 The Pole House at Fairhaven was built by Frank Dixon and instantly became a landmark, a manmade natural attraction, a concrete apostle, a sentinel guarding the eastern gate to The Great Ocean Road. It was built by the ancients in the seventies, a time before computers and ring roads when the coast was a rumor, and it became a totem in a far place.

Children in cars heading down the coast held competitions to see who could spot it first. It became such a shared part of the landscape people stopped to take photos, and as you stand on its balcony with a drink in your hand people wave from passing cars and toot their horns as if you hold some honorary position. Its current owners call this being anonymously famous.

The house has just been redesigned by Franco Fiorentini from F2 Architecture and is a brilliant new statue on an already famous pedestal. The house is a blaze of architectural brio. The taps have lights hidden in their mouths shining down along the bubbling paths of falling water, and alongside each light a diode, so when the water is cold it is blue, as the temperature rises to warm it turns purple and by the time the water is hot it is bright red. The couches recline and stretch at button-press. Blinds covering two whole walls rise at the press of another button, uncovering half the world. Wave your hand near a set of light switches and they glow and tell you whats on and whats not. The main room curves around a central bathroom pod clad in burnt ash panels. In front of the floor-to-ceiling window a suspended fireplace hangs from its own chimney essentially a fire burning in a cold sea. The floor is a dark stone the Medicis might have trod.

For all this, architectural features really have no significant place in the wonder of this house. Its defining and beguiling feature is that the sea and sky are in the room. The rumbling surf and two hundred degrees of ocean with a vast superstructure of cloud overhead. The mood of the house is set by the mood of these elements. Subservient to a constantly changing pageant of light, cloud, wave and color.

Dramatic reefs of fire to the west as the sun goes down, while in the East saturated purples fall to night. The closer you are to the sky the more its intricacies are laid bare. You soon understand this room might hold a thousand different sunsets. Another thousand dawns. In here, as part of the sea and sky, each day will be an entity set apart from those before and to come.

The land is a lesser, peripheral, presence. But you could study it all day from up here. Fifty kilometres of coast. From the Split Point Lighthouse at Aireys Inlet the Great Ocean Road rides a rollercoaster of hills through the forests of The Otways to and beyond Lorne. The hills ripple and fold with the passing sun.” Great Ocean Road Holidays