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We inherited the site with no buildings on it. It was just a cleared site, no bush and we were very
keen to design a holiday house for the family. It's the east side of the Coromandel Peninsula.
White sandy beaches facing north with kind of big views out to a series of islands.
So what we did is we knew early on that ubiquitous New Zealand building material,
timber was going to be what this home was all about and some of the ideas that informed it were
this contrast from the way we lived in Auckland and also a narrative about the place,
about the Coromandel. This has an exoskeleton, so the structure is essentially on the outside
and it came from a study of some of the early buildings, colonial buildings
in the area and in particular the old trip dams, which were built at the tops of the valleys.
The kauri trees were filled into them and then the dams were tripped and the logs were floated down
to the sawmills at the bottom of the valley and so we wanted this really, gutsy, strong
textured building that actually talked to a little bit of that history.
We liken the architecture to that of kind of a pineapple, you know it's got that very rugged
textured outside but you know, you slice it and it's kind of juicy and rich and kind of sweet
on the inside. The idea of closing up came quite early in the design process. We wanted a home that
we could basically close up, much like I guess going on holiday where you have a suitcase, you
arrive, you open it up and you use. We see this as very much the same idea. We arrive,
we open it up and we basically use the interior. It has some real advantages,
in particular, from an environmental point of view. Keeps the sun out of it doesn't
get hot and cold when we're not there and it protects the joinery and the interior and that's
one of the reasons why I think it still looks pretty pristine after 20 odd years of use.
So you arrive at a space in the middle, which is essentially just a ceiling and a floor and you
dissolve either side of it. So you're connected to the outside, so in the middle of summer,
we just open both sides and it's just a big shade pavilion and then we've got a series of bedrooms;
two main bedrooms and two bunk rooms, because we're always coming here with families. So
we've got girls in one end boys in the other end. A couple of
couples here and it worked incredibly well. We see this as basically just a refined way of camping.
We don't have curtains, we don't have drapes here, so as soon as the sun comes up, we're up.
We wanted the bathroom to be very experiential. We wanted to explore the social conventions
in another way because we've got privacy here, we can connect to the outside. So, you shower,
the water just falls on the floor. I grew up on a farm, so well used to shearing sheds and we've
just got a sheep's grating. The water goes through there and it's collected in a tray underneath
and also the idea of bathing. The bath is on wheels, so we just wheel that to the outside,
fill it up with water wheel it to the outside and then you can bathe in the sun or under the stars
and it's an extraordinary experience to have that kind of freedom, that connection to the world.
In terms of the kitchen and dining spaces, we wanted to use those in a different way than
living in a suburban or urban house. So we wanted to test how small we could make a kitchen and we
wanted it to dissolve in the background, so we don't see appliances we basically
don't see the utility of it.
One of the things about doing your own project is that it offers you the chance of experimentation
and real experimentation; you take risks that you wouldn't take with a normal client and there's
lots of kind of risks if you like that we took in this house. You know, this the idea of the
decks that rise and fall and could we actually design a mechanism that was successful. We wanted
to dissolve the connection between inside and outside, so we don't have seals to the doors.
We wanted it to be a log cabin and kind of express that as well. You know the construction,
there's kind of no jointing, you know. All the the rafters slot into the beams and are
basically housing joints, so again there's this element of craft as well as experimentation. So
everything that we kind of touched was unique in a sense. The building is quite utilitarian,
it can take some knocks. I mean you know, the building is, it's having its 21st birthday
this year and you know, it still performs and looks much like it did 21 years ago really,
so you know, it has stood the test of time and it's taken the knocks of time as well.
One of the successes of the house for me is the fact that
the extended family loves coming back to it. It's still, from time to time during the summer, that
place that we all congregate in; a repository of memories.
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