If architecture is frozen music then the tent is a ballad beside the symphony of his Deepwater Woolshed near Wagga Wagga. Set against a big sky and bleached grass, the shed has been hailed as “a remote outback temple” by Columbia ­University’s Ware Professor of Architecture, Kenneth Frampton. “This is surely one of the world’s improbable architectural masterpieces,” he ventured in a tribute to Stutchbury, this year’s recipient of the Australian Institute of Architecture’s Gold Medal. Local shearers call it “the resort” because of the water-cooled, naturally ventilated comfort from extremes of heat and an ingenious gate system for moving sheep. Of the 47 awards Stutchbury’s practice has won since 1995, this corrugated cathedral bagged six.

Reluctant, at first, to expose his “very personal abode” to further publicity, Stutchbury agrees to a tour of the once vacant block where his tent rests on a 48 square metre wooden platform incorporating an en suite, a bedroom and a prefabricated kitchen that walls one side of a shaded veranda. “It makes you realise how little you need,” he says, boiling the kettle for mugs of tea.

His desire to pare back coincided with packing up the West Head house where he’d lived with his former wife, landscape architect Phoebe Pape and their three children. “As I was taking everything out and putting it in boxes I thought really and truly…” The pink bathtub that had stood in one of the tree-high pavilions he’d designed for his family now sits amid straggly acacias out front of the tent. Inside there’s a fridge, a single gas burner to cook on if it’s too wet for an open fire, a flat-screen TV on top of the chest of drawers in the bedroom, and an old shearer’s table where we sit.