AUCKLAND Beautifully sited in a rural setting of mature trees, a large pond, and horse paddocks, this strong and elegant house has a calmness and certainty of place and purpose. With long horizontal planes, a 25m long lap pool and a 3.5m stud height this house has generosity and grandeur. An active family home, the living and service spaces are ordered along an axial spine giving a clarity to the plan. A restrained palette of concrete panels, cedar joinery, and light timber panelling highlights a controlled mastery of materials, detailing, light, and space. Concrete panels to the southern side provide thermal mass while the northern side is glazed with a long verandah and terraces and overhanging roof for sun and rain protection. This house is a thoroughbred.
It's a real privilege designing a house for your family.
From when I was a really young child, I was deeply affected by the environments that I was in
and I noticed how my mood would change depending on the environment around me.
So raising a young family, it was really important to me that they grow up in a
beautiful environment where they could spend a lot of time outside and have freedom to roam.
And so I wanted this house to be a joyful place, an oasis.
The house is not complicated in plan, but it's like a series of rectilinear boxes that stretch
out and connect down to the landscape. The volumes from the entry side are quite solid,
you know, the concrete is anchoring the house to the ground.
And as you come in, you sort of follow this curved path to the front door,
which is a big full height pivoting door. And as you open that,
you get that full immersion through the house to the landscape on the other side.
The summer, the canopy provides some shade, so you get beautiful light, but not too hot.
The westerly courtyard is beautiful in the afternoon and you have a sheltered space
out there with a fire in the evenings. In the northern side, you know, you've got
that area to sit and relax by the pool or down by the jetty.
It just creates a lot of different options and places that people can be separately or together.
The living space is the heart of the house. The materials selected, we wanted to have warmth.
The plywood and the timber joinery adds a softness and a juxtaposition to the precast
concrete panels. Again, the oak floors sort of make the house glow. The whole place is
a warm and inviting space to be in. It was designed so that in the wintertime,
the sun would come directly into the house and heat the spaces, and it does that beautifully.
The master bedroom down one end was designed to give sort of privacy over time as the family
grew and the kids became older. The kids' rooms are down one end and our room is down the other.
I think it's a really important time for the profession at the moment that we are mindful
going forward, the effect that we have on the environment. And I think living in a house that
you've designed gives you that opportunity to reflect on how things perform, how things are
connected to nature, how energy efficiency works. And I'm going to be taking some of
those lessons and developing them further as I go forward as an architect.
