Makers of Architecture built this Mangakuri home as panels and volumes in their own workshop, to rest on timber piles set while it was still indoors.
In association with First Windows & Doors.
From the road, this house shows you its back. A long timber screen runs the length of the elevation, with everything that makes it a home secreted on the other side.
Don had been collecting photography for a long time, even before moving to the homestead on this working farm above Mangakuri, in Te Matau-a-Māui/Hawke’s Bay. This house came next, when he wanted something simpler to return to between stretches of work overseas. It’s smaller, but with no less wall space.
The brief had two occupants: a life, and the documentation of it Don has spent years gathering. “He valued the connection with the place historically,” explains Beth Cameron, architect and co-director at Makers of Architecture. “It was about conceiving a modern home, without compromise.
“When we first visited the site, we were very aware of the edge condition, and its position opening out to the farm — ranges behind, wetlands in front,” says Beth. “We wondered how close we could get to that edge.” She laughs at the question now. It took a geotechnical engineer to answer, alongside a footprint already fixed by resource consent.
Don came to Makers for their ability to build offsite. The studio’s fabrication arm makes a home as panels and volumes, before any of it reaches the site. Out here, where securing a subcontractor is a project in itself, this service from Makers Fabrication settled it.
A rectangle was Don’s instruction — a move to keep maintenance at a minimum. Makers answered with a services spine down the southern, road-facing side: kitchen, pantry, bathroom, laundry and storage sit behind this screen. Gathering them on one side simplified the build, and the running of the home now. The northern rooms are dedicated to living and sleeping. The corridor between holds most of the collection.
At the entry there’s a wood pile and a bench to sit on while you get your boots off. Cross the threshold and things become a little less rural. “One requirement was a more formal entrance, to be able to welcome guests into the lounge, without going into the more personal areas,” says Beth.
Kitchen and dining group together at the north-west end, life spilling out onto the deck that wraps this elevation. A partition sections off the living room, giving back some of the wall the openings take away, and providing somewhere to gather around the fire in the evening.
Light took more solving, and the collection set the terms. To the north, it floods in through the openings, while clerestory windows above the southern spine allow it to reach the walls indirectly. “Light quality, control and the protection of those works was fundamental,” says Beth, “as well as having enough wall space.”
First Windows & Doors supplied the joinery: Metro Series ThermalHeart alongside APL Architectural Series profiles, anodised throughout. Two sets of four-panel sliders open the living room and dining onto the paddocks. “We’re not picking specific moments,” says Beth. “You’re just being absorbed into that view and the landscape.”
The envelope, agreed at the first conversation, was a worthy investment. The ThermalHeart frames are thermally improved and the Centrafix installation recesses the Metro Series units into the wall, so the insulating elements of the frame line up with the insulation in the wall itself. It also does away with traditional exterior flashings, which is one less detail that has a chance of failing. Inside there are no reveals and no trims; an opening is a gap in the wall and nothing more. “It really helps the experience of focusing on what’s important to Don,” says Beth.
The house came down the road on three trucks, to rest on timber piles set while it was still indoors. “In construction terms it’s the most exciting part of the project. Once those trucks pull up, the panels go together within days. All of a sudden you feel like your house has arrived,” she says.
Underneath, it’s unglamorous. The piles that kept the groundworks light can be re-levelled after a quake, hold the floor clear in a flood or carry the home somewhere else. Where a fitting could work by hand, it does, because the simplest option is the one most likely to look after itself.
“This is Don’s place entirely. He’s made it his own. There’s a real ease when you’re in here,” says Beth, who has spent time at the home since it was finished. In the morning you raise the blinds to the sun coming up over the hills. At dusk the lights come on inside and push out through the slatted timber, the screen that gave nothing away from the road glowing along the escarpment like a signal house.
firstwindows.co.nz
Words Alice Lines
Photography Simon Wilson
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