North Shore House
North Shore House
“We want to build a home for our family where we feel comfortable spending most of our time. The building reflects the patterns and events of our lives and links to the environment we live in.”
From the client brief.
The brief for this house was thoughtful and concise. The objective was for an honest house, true to the materials from which it is constructed.
The land, which abuts a reserve on one side and an unoccupied site on the other, falls from the end of a quiet no-exit street down to a smallish sea cliff and into the sea. The house inevitably does the same, while enriching the journey by providing places to stop along the way and offering different pathways both inside and out to choose from.
In this sense of movement and journeying, the house is both object and landscape – as something to be both in and on. This is a deliberate blurring of the relationship between ‘earthwork’ and ‘skyworks’ and is reflected in the intersection and overlapping of construction and materials, block work and timber. All sheltering beneath a roof plane of gravel populated by timber-clad roof lights that both emit and admit light, a reciprocity that is at the core of this project.
MoreLess
Awards
NZIA Supreme NZ Award for Architecture 2004