This Home Is a Love Letter to Nature (House Tour)

What is the climate like in Piha? It's got black sand. It's got the Tasman Ocean. It has cold southwest winds. It also has though, it has this fringe of behutakawa trees which run along the beach which provide some refuge from the wind and the way they formed you can see they're leaning away from the wind. It's a wild, wild coast. I'm Lance Herbst of Herbst Architects and this is the Kawakawa Beach House. The house is situated overlooking Piha Beach which is on the west coast of Auckland about a 45 minute drive out of the city. So the topography of the beach really is pretty steep mountains coming straight down onto the coast and the house is pushed up against the base of a fairly steep mountain. This house is all about light and air. It's designed to let the wind in and it's designed to let the light in. It's construed as being a building that wants to be open as much as possible. It's almost a pavilion more than a building but it can shut down and be completely protected from the weather but that's not its primary setting as it were. Where the house sits in the topography it's kind of layered. If you start at low tide really you've got kind of wet sand and it reflects the sky in a way and then as you move up you get onto a kind of hot, hot beach but it's got dune grasses in it and then just behind that is a road that runs the length of the beach which services the houses behind that. So the site essentially starts at the road at the back of the dunes and it runs right up to the top of the mountain and the buildable part of the site was essentially an existing building that was on the site that we demolished. The reason being is that the rest of the site is covered in mature pahutakawa trees which are highly respected and protected in New Zealand so the idea really was to get out of the ground as much as possible so essentially the entire brief is lifted up off the ground. So the design of the house responds more to the canopy of the pahutakawa trees than it does to the beach in some way. On arrival you arrive in a car you drive underneath the building there's some storage down on that level but essentially you arrive up a spiral stair and you are immediately encountered with a negative space in the centre of the square of the plan above which is open it's an open courtyard which is glazed on three sides. You then enter into a very simple living dining kitchen arrangement which is spread out so that we can pick up the view onto the beach from all the spaces. There's a circulation system which wraps around the open courtyard which gets you to three bedrooms around the back and bathrooms attached to those. So the building form really came out of the first decision was to lift it out of the ground to get the view and then what we really wanted to do was engage with pahutakawa trees so a clear story all the way around the top floor allows us to engage with the trees from all spaces the bedrooms the bathrooms each one having its own particular relationship with different parts of the forest. That really is one of the most rewarding things because it has been beyond our imagination in terms of its success is that it really does you can you can be in the space and you cannot help but your eyes constantly lift up being pulled up to the tree so it's been remarkably successful in that regard. The outside of the building is essentially two materials and that's glass and bandsaw and which is fractured and coloured to kind of pick up on the striated bark of a pahutakawa tree. Otherwise we've got some block work and some steel in the base of the building but essentially it's a very mono palette on the outside it's just black timber, glass. Material wise once we get inside of the building we're essentially using a palette of birch ply and structural radiator timber and spotted glump flooring so where we've used the birch ply on the outside we've stained it dark to match the colour of the trees whereas we've kept the natural colour of the timber to the radiator frame and to the ceiling and onto the floor it's just natural timber colours inside the space. The other sensors are very well serviced in this part of the world as well and particularly this site is that if you open up to the west and the wind is blowing off the ocean there's so much salt you can actually feel it on your skin that makes it slightly sticky it's very very particular. Other sensors is that colour is a huge thing and all of those those red flowers on the pahutakawa bring in tui and birds and so there's constant bird song in this part of the world. At a certain time of the year these trees are covered in cicadas and it becomes deafening. In terms of the wind the way it hits the trees it's not so much of a whistling through the trees it's more the wind hitting a resistance and there's kind of like a movement of the trees and a kind of a groaning but here the movement of not just the boughs moving but the entire body of foliage. For this house we're really proud of the way the building responds to the landscape and how it presents as part of the landscape now that it's finished that it's not an imposition into it. Favourite part is the games we had with the Clear Story and what it gives back the the light it gives back the views it gives back the elegance of structure that it gives back.