Although their last project under the original two architects was completed in 1976, the firm continues to flourish in the educational sector and merged with a larger international practice in 2022, and is now known as PMDL-McGlashan Everist (PMDL-MEA).
"[1] Typifying their designs were low-spread houses with flat roofs, which they would step down sloping sites, and walls of tall, timber-framed windows that did not open.
Influenced by international design ideas, McGlashan and Everist believed in the importance of connecting site and architecture, and aimed to create houses specifically for the Australian landscape.
It was built as a retirement home that could also serve as a holiday house, on a large block of land at Rye, surrounded by natural bush of melaleucas and casuarinas.
"[3] "The house, designed on a 10-foot (3.048 m) module, comprises five flat-roofed pavilions, linked by covered ways, which create a variety of sheltered outdoor courtyards between the wings.
The site itself is steeped in the art history of Australia, situated by the Yarra River, a favoured location of Heidelberg School painters from the late 19th century.
Through these techniques McGlashan "offered a distinct spatial interpretation of the Reed’s more general desire, expressed in the brief, for internal walls 'extending into the garden' " .
Glare is removed, but the precision with which McGlashan overlaps the walls suggests that he was not merely solving a functional problem but also establishing a separation between the realms of nature on the one hand and art and architecture on the other.