My name is David Ponting. I'm an architect from Ponting Fitzgerald Architects. Our role
has been to design this house and deliver a family home for Ross, Max and the kids.
This house has been built in Point Chevalier; it's a inner harbour zone about five kilometres
from the central city. It's just got to be a beautiful feel, as though you're a long way from
a city yet right on the doorstep of one. Now the size itself is sitting directly above the beach.
The bluff that the land sits on is really almost a sand dune and because we're looking
down at a beach, we have this incredible ability to treat the architecture as an
extension of the beach and so the principal design idea was to create a sandcastle.
The long narrow site had a lot to do with the form of the building because we had to stretch
the building along the length to fit everything in. I think the most important aspect about the
building is the fact that it is cast in concrete on site and so the playfulness that you have in
working with sand as a child is something that's sort of become a grown-up process, where we've
really looked at what forms can you achieve that represent the sensation of being at the beach.
When you enter the home you go through this channel between these two forms
and you realise that there's an opening on your right hand side which
effectively reaches a tunnel all the way through to the living space.
Another aspect of the building is it is a three-story home.
It doesn't appear as such when you arrive but once you're in the middle, you realise
there's a staircase that just descends down into a basement play area and also rides up into a void
which leads to the master bedroom. It's a very dynamic set of spaces you're experiencing,
with elongation horizontally and vertically, let alone the view shafts that you're getting
left and right; the snippets of the harbour as you move through.
The recognition of where we are as a coastal property, which is really hit hard by the
weather on a bad day, we knew we could talk about the erosive nature of the climate;
of the wind, of the sea, the sand, the salt and let the building feel as
though it has been aggressed by that climatic environment for 100 years and here it is now
does weather beaten, still and assured of its place on this landscape.
Ross is a builder and he's had a lot of experience using concrete and he wanted it,
he wanted a real challenge on his hands. Concrete was really the only choice for
us in the matter of building this house, firstly because that's what I do and what I'm
trained in and what I've spent a lot of time learning. You know, just to be able to form
anything we like out of concrete, you know in its liquid state, we can do whatever we like.
People come around here and just are amazed they look everywhere and then we bring clients
here a lot too to show the the textures of the concrete and so they can sort of touch it and
see it and that sort of thing you know. They get the sense of what it's like, the sound,
the warmth you know, the volume that we're creating here and all this sort of thing.
Spent a lot of time researching and testing and this sort of thing and all around New Zealand I
spent a lot of time going to different sites and assisting other builders and they're designing
their formwork and talking to their local batching plants and coming up with the mixed designs.
So additionally to the concrete here you know, we don't want something that's totally
concrete. We've used a lot of Atlantic stone from a fantastic supplier here in Tauranga
and to the cedar. You know, we had a little bit more concrete in a couple of areas in the house.
Matt and David said "no, maybe we put cedar over that wall" and it really works you know
and that's where from their knowledge of where we needed to put it and although it's a solid house,
it's also got that sort of juxtaposition of the cedar with it, which I think really works well.
The way the light can enter the building is obviously through the big windows that
we're looking out of, but also through voids that go right through to the roof
and with the kitchen-living area being in the the western end of the property, we had to
make the most of the big hole in the ceiling to get morning sun down to where you hang out.
This is a home that has so many unique qualities to it but the most enduring and enjoyable
is the feel of the concrete in the space, the way it absorbs light and provides such a sense of
permanence and solidity to the home, a sense of calm which you just can't achieve using
lighter weight materials. There's an incredible strength and the house feels pure, refined, rugged
or all of these sensations in one go.
From this home, I'm most proud of you know, the actual build itself, our piece of land art,
but also the way our family was involved with building it. You know, as we were building this
main house in particular, you know we had the children involved as well, so it's just been
a fantastic sort of legacy for them as well, knowing that they were involved with this build
and how you know, they can look around here and go, "we helped with that as well" and sort of
them probably knowing that I can never sell it, because that would kill me, you know.
We're really proud to have come up with a home that feels good where it is; it fits and
recognises where it is and has been thought about very carefully to express that sense of place.