This house is in an incredible kind of isolated location on Waiheke Island,
which is a beautiful island in Auckland Gulf. It's really separated from everything else but the
specifics of the site that I loved was the fact that we had the sea, we had this ridge
and bush and then this creek running through, so those were the main drivers of the design.
When we were a few weeks from finishing the house unfortunately. it was a sort of crazy accident and
half the house burnt down and it happened in such a kind of crazy way that this kind of sawdust that
was sitting around on the site that caught fire to the garage and then the electric batteries
were in the garage, so once they caught the whole thing pretty much disappeared. It was a terrible
situation for everyone but when I was looking through it, the project name,
the Maori goddess for fire is Mahuika, so sort of as a play on this idea of fire and renewal
and there's a great legend attached to that as well.
As anyone that knows that's been to Auckland, there's always four seasons in one day and here
we get this amazing drama of where a storm coming through and all of a sudden it goes dark and you
can, you know, and then all of a sudden the sun just purses out and the whole thing comes alive,
so for us the idea of lighting and light,
natural light was an idea of drama and the experience of living in this environment.
The actual road is quite a long way from the house so you immediately
get off the main track and you really are on a goat track of a road - you're immediately
immersed in the kind of dense, tropical bush of New Zealand. There's amazing bush there.
The cantilever was a great example of when part of the client brief is so complicated that you have
to come up with very innovative solutions. Our client was very specific about a 20 meter pool
but the site restraints were such that there was really nowhere to put it and have the house,
so that I thought well actually we could push the pool right up against the bush and then have
the main living area just hanging out over the top, so it's a sort of a great two for one deal.
I think Fisher and Paykel were involved with this from day one, you know the client was really keen
to use the product and we've got a really good relationship with the Fisher and Paykel team,
so they gave us a lot of advice about what appliances would work well in this environment.
Being on an island a long way from anything, the client's brief has lots of storage. The main
priority was really you know, cold food storage so they can go to supermarket once and forget
about it for the rest of the time on the holiday, so that drove a lot of the decisions we made. Our
client liked pretty low-key, sort of acidic, so she was pretty settled on the white and
we kind of just used the F&P products to offset that so, obviously a lot of integrated,
but the ovens with the black, you know for me, it was a bit of contrast but
also reflected back the kind of bush or the sea view depending on when you were looking at it.
The bathrooms were lined up on this sort of bush side, really for the privacy obviously, that's the
more private side and so people won't be looking, so which gave us the opportunity to have them as
clear glass and each one is framed with a view. The bath is, you know, particularly spectacular.
It has this kind of wonderful view across the lawn and out to the, to the bush beyond. The bedrooms
are spread out over two levels and it's kind of a stratification based on privacy and also guest
importance, so the main bedroom is directly above the pavilion, above the kitchen part, and that has
you know beautiful views and then there's another whole level with the guest bedroom so that kind of
just gives them privacy from from the family but also their inability to engage when they want to.
I mean the challenges of building on a remote site are pretty, pretty,
pretty extreme; it's it's a real commitment from the the contractor to say they're going to do
something here. Just people getting here, you know you can imagine, in the middle of winter, this
kind of goat track turns into a kind of a stream, so I saw many concrete trucks spinning, spinning
around while we were on site. The main materials of this house is the concrete, which is you know
from the ground. There's piles having to hold this whole thing up but then when we, from above this
level, we transition to timber framing. There's a beautiful kind of Waiheke stone wall, which is
kind of this idea of anchoring it into the natural environment and in the black cedar. You know they
say the colour of the New Zealand bush is black so a black building just disappears into the bush.
I think my favourite part of the house is the staircase that leads to the pool. You know,
you come out of this bright pavilion, the staircase, we have a dark walnut and then
you look down to the deck and the pool and the reflection underneath the cantilever and then the
bush beyond. You know the thing that clients often say is that they have a sense of peacefulness in
spaces and I think if a client tells me that then you know that's the thing I'm most proud
of because I think that kind of harmony, you know, is quite difficult to achieve. So yeah,
the feeling that you have in this space, you know, when the sun suddenly kind of flicks out,
that's the thing I'm most proud of; it's a real sort of theatre of the environment.