In Eltham, known as Nillumbik for thousands of years, meaning shallow roots / shallow earth. On the lands of the Wurundjeri-willam Custodians of the Kulin Nation.
Alistair Knox has been part of my world since the very beginning.
I was born in a mudbrick home in Victoria's north-east, built by my parents. My mum in particular was inspired by Knox's mudbrick movement through the 1970s and decided to create her own muddie. I grew up inside his philosophy before I knew who he was.
When I moved to Eltham, the sharehouse I felt drawn to wasn't mudbrick. But it had a particular feeling. Brown bricks, wooden wall panels, floor to ceiling windows. I found out later it was an Alistair Knox extension. The feeling of home suddenly made sense.
Knox's buildings draw you in because they look like they belong where they've landed. They rest in the landscape, sitting quietly amongst trees, only a whisper of difference between indoors and out. Standing inside them feels like home in the warmest possible sense. The mudbricks offer a grounded calm. His use of specific tones and textures creates an ambient light that's hard to name but easy to feel. Understated in the best possible way.
It's easy to walk past the mudbrick details without stopping to think that each one was crafted by hand, most likely from the clay of the site itself. That's an intimate kind of locality. The bricks belong because they came from the same earth they're sitting on.
Knox's philosophy was about treading lightly. Living true to what you believed. Being a pioneer of the imperfect, the anti-manufactured, the handmade. In his time that was countercultural. Now it feels urgent.
We live in an age where it's easier than ever to buy something cheap, fast and disposable, often at the expense of someone else's livelihood. Knox was building against exactly that impulse, decades before it reached the scale it has. His philosophy is harder to live by today than it was when he was practising it. I think that's why being in his spaces feels so good. They're a reminder that another way was possible, and that it still is.
He's an Eltham icon, and a blueprint for living more in harmony with the earth.
