GREAT BARRIER

This is a house on Great Barrier Island, which was conceived alongside a network of walking tracks that run through the regenerating bush. The track runs past the house and forms one side to the semi-enclosed living spaces before it zig-zags down the hill.

The site is approximately 30 hectares of regenerating bush in the shape of a big ‘L’ on Great Barrier Island. We spent day one of our first site visit bashing our way through trees attempting orient ourselves and find boundaries without GPS. It turned out we spent the whole day in only one half of the site, and found the other half on day two. There was a north facing patch of bare land between the two halves, at the corner of the ‘L’, where a view of the whole site opens up for the first time. It was a good spot to find. That’s where we put the house.  

It obviously wasn’t an easy site to access, but to minimize the environmental impact we only built a narrow path to the house. This put some miles on the clock of our builder’s old quad bike, but it also put the suburbs of Auckland well out of mind by pushing the house further away from the road and into the landscape. Wandering down a bushy path is one of the great attractions to this beautiful piece of land so the path quickly became central to our thinking. Rather than build a path around the house, we built a house around a path. The path winds across the hill to the house from the driveway, then sets up both the geometry and attitude of the house as it zig-zags down to the bare land below it.  

Buildings in extraordinary landscapes tend to either set themselves apart from the landscape by bold sculptural gestures or camouflage themselves among it. In our case though, the triangular geometry set up by the zig-zag does both. The triangular timber screens fold up from the path and over the house making a sculptural object quite distinct from the natural forms around it yet, like the use triangulation in computer modelling and surveying software, the geometry of the house approximates the slope of the hill and merges into it below the path to form gardens and support the regenerating bush.