The owners, who use this dwelling for extended summer and winter vacations, are no strangers to RTA Studio’s work. Their permanent residence in Tāmaki Makaurau was designed by us. And so here, familiar influences are incorporated too: in the truncated front of the gable that provides volume for a loft level in the family bedroom and bathroom quarters, and in the way the home keys in, materially, to the design DNA of its immediate environment.
Draped in a galvanized corrugate rainscreen, aged with an acid wash, the house, on an elevated site, speaks the vernacular of its country cousins. Concealed gutters and downpipes accentuate a crisp outline against the sky as a stone wall channels the arrival journey to the entrance link at the intersection of the two sheds. A front-door shroud in weathered steel makes an industrial statement, while a circular stone chimney projects above the pyramid-like envelope.
Within this square footprint, which accommodates communal living zones and the primary bedroom, is a circular plan. Rooms are laid out in a whorl anchored around the centrifugal fireplace. Roughly a quarter of the area is dedicated to living, another to the kitchen and dining, a third to the main suite, and the whole is completed by a covered outdoor room, grounded in crazy paving, that shelters beneath the volume. The hero of this shed is the bagged-schist chimney stack, 2.5 metres in diameter - a visual connector in every space, it draws the occupants into its warm sphere, with fireboxes facing the living area and the outdoor room.
Continuing the pastoral palette, repurposed ironbark beams support the roof structure: robust ribs of timber that meet in the middle. Sarking and wall linings in natural Abodo are a smoked-coffee colour which teams with deep-grey polished-concrete floors as a contrast to the lighter-toned exterior. Full-height windows frame a spectacle of mountainous proportions – all the way to Kingston at the southernmost end of the lake - as reflections and shadows slip across the floors.
Across in the square-shaped sleeping shed, smaller box windows in utility spaces and the powder room are intentional. There is a quieter, more intimate mood. Picked out with purple-ash shrouds, the restrained glazing zooms in on aspects of pastureland. In a loft level, picture windows and skylights usher the scenery into a private study while, in an internal bathroom below, plastered walls are washed with shafts of soft light borrowed from above.
Endemic to its environment, this house has its roots in history and its foundations in land where established trees have already softened it into its site. Two sheds. One cohesive story.