Paetawa House

The house is located at Pekapeka Beach, a small seaside settlement 1 hours drive north of Wellington City. It is a small 1 bedroom house for a working couple. He works in Wellington and she in Palmerston North. The house is set on gently undulating dune lands, facing northwest, looking across the road and lower dunes out to the Tasman Sea and Kapiti Island to the west. It is intended for the house to both relate to the horizontality of this landscape and also be at odds with it, as if it had been left there, or washed up.

The exterior is composed of a rhythm of painted fibre cement panels. Elements of wall, roof beam, roof layers and brise soliel are expressed separately, with light entering in places in between. There is a sense of horizontal and vertical layering, and metaphorically a sense of dislocation and relaxation of parts, as if a creature or construction had been left high and dry above the tide.