Waiatarua House

The brief was for a new house on a challenging, steep site in a bush clad creek gully. One of the design challenges was to insert a bold intervention into a sensitive bush reserve whilst still maintaining a sense of modesty and poetic. Conceived as a series of sculptural components, the design plays on purity and scale of the program articulated through three simple elemental forms that step down the site towards the creek – the roof of one floor creating a level platform for the next.

The exterior is black stained timber and appears as a dark silhouette behind the veil of green foliage provided by the trees. The design intentionally does not try to compete or mimic the wild beauty and intricacy expressed in surrounding natural environment, but rather assumes quiet, understated position in contrast – a reductivist idiom, stripped of excessive articulation and noise.

The parti for the interior explores a sterotomic spatial diagram, where the overall volume of the house is carved to accommodate vertical circulation and a number of functional overlays. Rooms are served by, and branch out from a vertical circulation shaft that runs the full height of the house.