Building Wayfinder: Episode 4

There’s a point on the approach to Wayfinder where the building seems to rise out of the landscape.

It sits low. Partly underground. Native planting moves across the roofline. Rammed earth, timber and concrete meet the surrounding bush. From some angles, it’s difficult to tell exactly where the landscape ends, and the building begins. But that ambiguity is intentional.

For Patrick Kosky of Kerry Hill Architects, curiosity was one of the qualities the design needed to create: “The idea that you glimpse parts of it, that it piques your interest, that you move, and as you move into it, a series of spaces unfold. You walk over a bridge, you walk into a cave, and there’s this sense of mystery and wanting to explore and find out more about the space.”

In Building Wayfinder: Episode 4 — The Design, Patrick and Head Winemaker Andrew Trio take us behind a design six years in the making. One shaped by the landscape it sits within, the wines being made beneath it and a shared belief that the building should feel like it belongs here.

Starting with the wine

Kerry Hill Architects first became involved with Wayfinder in 2020. What followed was a six-year process of designing, reconsidering and refining the building through COVID, rising construction costs and the realities of an ambitious project.

“What are the essential things we’re going to do, and how are we going to deliver them?” Patrick recalls asking during the process. “There was redesign work and design exploration that occurs to arrive at the answer to the question of: what is this winery in a building form?”

One of those essentials had been clear from the beginning. Wayfinder wanted a gravity-fed winery. Head Winemaker Andrew Trio had a detailed understanding of how fruit needed to move through the space, while the architects had to translate that process into a building.

“Working with Andrew, he had a very clear idea of how he wanted the winery to operate. We aren’t winemakers, so he was very helpful in educating us about the process and flows that the building needed to support.”

For Andrew, bringing the winery onto the same property as the vineyard was just as important. “It’s just connectivity with the vineyard,” he explains. “I think it’s really important for the winery team and the vineyard team to act as one.”

Being metres rather than kilometres apart gives the team the flexibility to walk the vineyard, respond to what they see and pick in small parcels as each block is ready. The building had to support that same considered approach once the grapes reached the winery.

Building into the landscape

The site chosen for the winery was unusual: an existing turkey-nest dam. For the architects, what initially looked like a challenge quickly became one of the defining ideas of the project.

“It was also a really exciting opportunity and idea for the building that we might submerge it within the ground and create a semi-subterranean building.”

The dam provided the level change required for gravity-led winemaking. Grapes arrive at the upper level, where they can be cooled, sorted or pressed, before moving by gravity into tanks below and eventually into the underground barrel cellar. That means less reliance on mechanical pumps and gentler handling of the fruit. For Andrew, it also creates more time.

With intact berries entering fermentation, extraction can happen slowly and softly. His aim is to build depth and structure while retaining elegance — part of a broader move towards wines defined by “purity, fruit expression and nuance.”

The underground design has another advantage. Earth provides natural thermal stability, helping maintain the consistent temperatures a working winery needs while reducing its energy demand — particularly important when the entire facility operates off-grid.

In other words, the architecture isn’t simply wrapped around the winemaking process. It’s part of it.

Peeling back the landscape

Once the functional requirements were established, the challenge became how the building should sit within its surroundings.

“We saw the opportunity to essentially bring the roof down to the level of the landscape, so it reads like you’ve just peeled a section of the landscape up and then slipped the building below. It’s not a discrete object that sits within a field. It’s actually embedded within the field,” expains Patrick.

Native grasses and flora move across the building. Rammed earth references the colour and weight of the surrounding soils. Timber brings the warmth of the treed landscape inside. The lower spaces become darker and more enclosed as you descend through the winery.

Patrick describes the journey as moving from “bright open fields” into increasingly “cave-like, intimate spaces”. It’s an architectural experience, but also a distinctly South West one.

A calmer place to make wine

Inside, Andrew wanted something else from the design: calm. “Harvest can be a hectic time,” he says. “That’s when all the decisions that will have the biggest impact on the wine will be made.”

So the team considered the smaller things that could make those weeks more measured. Better workflow. Less double-handling. Gravity rather than pumps and lines. Natural light. Spaces that are comfortable to work in.

“It all kind of plays a part in slowing things down, making a more comfortable and thoughtful environment to work in, which we strongly believe impacts the final wine quality at the end of the day.”

The materials used inside the winery extend that thinking to the wines themselves.

Stainless steel is used for brightness, purity and freshness. Concrete makes up half the red fermentation cellar, bringing aromatic purity, focus and persistent tannin. Ceramic is being explored for its low oxygen transfer and subtle effect on texture. Then there is oak, from smaller French barriques to larger formats.

Andrew describes them simply as: “Spices in the spice rack to gently shape your wines.”

There isn’t one vessel or technique that defines Wayfinder. The winery was designed to give the team room to experiment, learn and respond to each parcel differently.

Designed to be explored

From the beginning, the winery, Cellar Door and restaurant were considered together. Rather than hiding production behind the hospitality spaces, the building invites guests into it.

A dedicated path follows the winemaking journey from grape processing through fermentation and maturation, before arriving at more intimate tasting spaces. Large viewing windows look into the working winery.

“Visitors can kind of touch and feel and taste everything that we’re working on,” Andrew says. “Just being able to see and touch those things rather than reading about it on the back of the wine label really solidifies the message and what we’re all about.”

A building that keeps unfolding

The winery completed its first vintage in 2026. But that doesn’t mean the design process is finished.

“Winemaking is really a lifelong learning curve,” Andrew says. “The way we’re producing the wines, the way we’re utilising the space will evolve over the coming years.”

And soon, guests will become part of it too.

For Patrick, after years spent resolving the technical details of the building, that is when architecture really begins to have a life of its own: “As architects, you bury yourself in the technical resolution of a building for a long time, and you don’t get to step back until the end and think about how it becomes a stage set for people’s lives.”

A winery where grapes are grown and transformed. A restaurant and Cellar Door. A place to learn, gather and celebrate. All embedded in the landscape that shaped it.