Shannon Battisson has never really believed in the idea of a forever home.
But a promise is a promise, and the one she made to her mentor that she would save his house after he'd gone has made her rethink things.
As an architect, she loves a challenge.
But taking on an eccentric 1970s house that was, until recently, actively collapsing, was almost more than she could handle.
Battisson likes to put her money where her mouth is, and specialises in modifying existing homes, rescuing heritage builds, and encouraging people to see past the idea that tearing down a house is the only option.
The irony is that she had already designed the perfect home for her family, a high-performing, energy-efficient, solar-passive four-bedroom house in the new suburb of Denman Prospect.
She did it, she says, to show what can be done on a relatively small block; the house includes a four-car garage, a pool, dozens of trees and a stunning "conversation pit" where the family gather without technology.
She and her husband planned to live there until their two children had flown the coop, then downsize to something more modest.
But when Laurie Virr, the visionary architect who had helped her learn to love her own profession, asked her to keep his house standing, she took her promise seriously.
She didn't realise it at the time, but honouring her word would eventually entail going into massive debt and fixing the place herself.
"I made a promise to ... help share the story of the house and what he was trying to do with the house, which I think is a really beautiful story," she said.
"And then it kind of suddenly came to be that somebody had to buy the house, and so we decided it should probably be us. So in the worst financial decision we've probably ever made, we bought the house and are now becoming the custodians of it in more ways than I had really thought about before.
"We're downsizing definitely sooner than we had planned."
Virr, a famously cantankerous and exacting architect, built the low-lying house nestled into the now-established bushland of Kambah in 1975, to the same dimensions as a standard government house at the time.
Like Battisson, this was also to prove a point - that boundaries could be challenged.
"He was very dedicated to what he did, and he was dedicated to the craft and the thought that went behind it," she said.
"I think he would have been, I imagine, actually quite difficult to have as an architect because if you wanted to request a window over the sink or something, you were quite likely, I would imagine, to be told no.
"But then, what he actually gifted you through his work is just so intensely beautiful. I think the clients who really stuck with him on that journey."
And the house couldn't have been more different to the boxy three-bedroom dwellings that thousands of Canberrans came to call home in the 1970s.
Famous in international architectural circles for its advanced design and complex geometry, it never got much attention here in Canberra.
Virr lived and worked there for nearly 50 years, and, with his wife Mary, hosted thousands of visitors and clients.
For Battisson, it became a place of healing. Virr was nearing the end of his life when he agreed to take her on as a kind of protege.
She'd had a hard time at university, nursing her father through terminal cancer, and hadn't enjoyed her learning experience.
Virr agreed to help her with an Institute of Architects project, even though he was "notoriously very anti-establishment".
"But he said that he would do the projects that I had reached out about if I would come and talk with him about architecture," she said.
"And so I came every Sunday afternoon after that, just sat for a couple of hours, and we talked about life, and it really re-inspired my love."
In the winter, the fire crackled, and in the summer, the breeze and birdsong floated through the open glass doors.
After Virr died in 2021, and it became clear she would need to buy the house herself - it was actually her husband's idea - she wanted to recapture some of that energy.
But first, she had to take out the roof, deal with months of chaos, and put up with several tradies - the same ones she'd hired to carry out work on the house - tell her she should tear the place down.
She's now moved her own practice into the space Virr used to work, and breathed life into the perfectly designed spaces filled with the bespoke furniture he built into the rooms as a way of maximising space.
Eventually, she says, the family will move into the house and live there, trading in the pool, en suites and spacious rooms for a small but ingeniously designed space that will take some getting used to.
"I believe in my work, the work I do with government and advocating for better outcomes for our homes, but also my private clients," she said.
"I do a lot of work restoring and renovating older houses, which is what we really need to do in terms of saving our environment, meeting the climate and housing crisis - taking our existing housing stock, working with it, improving its thermal performance, and giving it a whole new chapter. So really, that's what we're doing with Rivendell."
The hardest part, she says, has been heating the place; Virr's ideas around solar passivity were sound, but not achievable without double-glazing, which wasn't available when he created his curved glass wall. Installing non-invasive heating has been nearly impossible, and the open fireplace doesn't heat the entire house.
But the sun reflecting on the new water feature she's installed in front of the glass wall makes dancing shadows on the living room's walls, the garden is filling with birds and no two days are the same.
It's been a long process, she says, but worth it.
"By investing in it, we're saving all of that carbon, all of those bricks and the timber and glass from going to a scrap-heap, so we're giving it a whole new chapter."
