An Architects Own Family Home That Blends with Nature (House Tour)

This The Local Project video is sponsored by Koalas Torokina Outdoor Furniture. Live more of the life out back. I guess the feeling of this house is I think this seamless connection with nature and landscape. My name is Davor Popaduch, I'm an architect and this is our family home. The home is located in Hahei on Coromandel Peninsula on North Island of New Zealand. The site is three and a half hectares and we purchased it approximately seven years ago. Originally we weren't thinking about moving here full-time because we were still thinking of just having a piece of land and camp on it. But as we kept coming here the kids never wanted to go back so we've decided to sell up and build our family home instead. The house is a very hard working house because we've got two businesses you know that we run out of this house plus a family home so it is quite a complex brief. My wife is really interested in design. I mean she's a key driver behind every decision that we take as a family and the kids are incredibly engaged and we wanted that process to be inclusive so everyone feels empowered by it. As you approach the site you drive down the long driveway. There's a gap in the wall where you can take the steps towards the front door. To your right there's an outhouse or a guest house that we call it. The front door is also facing the view. So in the main area we have the kitchen, dining and living and further from that we've got bedrooms for kids and ourselves and the garage and the laundry at the south end of the house. The design was hugely influenced by the environmental and landscape attributes. We had to collect the rainwater because there's no town supply here. We also are exposed to extremes of the weather here in Coromandel so as far as sheltering and protecting the house from the wind and rain, the eaves and the roof were the key. Also when the weather is not as extreme you've got a courtyard on one end that is sheltered from the sea breeze or when it's blowing more from the east or northeast we can go to the front deck that's facing the view as well so you've got this dual aspect. Because in coastal environments you always end up having a wind from somewhere typically and this allows this flexibility in the design. The view is quite amazing down to the lonely bay and we wanted to obviously capture that throughout as much of the house as possible. One of the key examples where we maximized the view was the bathroom. We have created this timber shutter that opens out and allows for the view out of the bath. In terms of materials we used corrugated iron on the roof. We've used timber wader boards. We've used stainless steel for our kitchen benchtop because we are a large family and we really didn't want to worry about the maintenance and the wear and tear aspect because it gets used all day every day. We differentiate the structure by staining it in black. It's still timber but we wanted to distinguish the structure from the linings. When we bought this land none of this was here, none of the plants were here, so we've chosen the hard route because we really wanted to restore this land as much as possible and the house developed out of this idea that you can live with the landscape and be part of it and not impose ourselves on the land. It's fantastic to see the hard labor paid off and the birds have come back, the planting's in and it's flowering. What I'm most proud of in this project is the way we've engaged with it as a family. It's been quite a journey for us and it's been incredibly rewarding. Outback is where Aussies truly live, on the back deck or in the backyard. Torikina Outdoor Furniture is stylish, comfy and built to handle anything the Aussie climate and Aussies themselves throw at it. Live more of the life Outback.