Inside An Off-Grid Coastal Home In New Zealand | Green Home Of The Year

We've inherited 16 acres of undulating landscape on the Kapiti Coast. We're very lucky that the former owner Mari had undertaken an incredible planting exercise propagating native plants and creating a series of two large covenanted wetlands which takes up about half the property. The remainder is a series of rolling hills and paddocks and a mixture of exotic and native planting. We feel very blessed both as an architect to be in this situation being able to design a house in this landscape but also to do one for my family and I is really special. Both in terms of the guardianship of the land but also the opportunity to create a building that sits lightly in it and in fact it's more about the landscape than the house itself. Sitting gently on the land but having a wider aspiration to do something really environmentally powerful and to do something that it is off-grid or can be off-grid. The house is in two parts or two key parts there's the main house which has two bedrooms and a large living space and then there's the tower which is multifunctional in either two bedrooms or a living room in a bedroom. That sits about 15 metres away and allows for our visitors and guests to have some privacy or additional privacy and autonomy when they stay. The house and tower are very different architecturally, the house being a long extruded form and the tower being a two-storey volume. The materials are the same both internally and externally with the hardboard and recycled rimu on the inside and the akoya cladding on the outside. The two forms sit differently in the landscape but they traverse the contours and so with an idea that they work alongside and with the landscape not trying to fight it and so all of the paths and even the pool and so on and decking are as a result of the existing forms in the landscape. Some of the elements that are included in the performance of the house include its natural orientation, its deep eaves providing solar shading, its external insulation, its internal insulation being all wool. The concrete slab which is a portion of the main house has a 30% less carbon through the inclusion of fly ash instead of cement and so just providing less carbon. The exterior cladding akoya doesn't need to be maintained, can be in the ground for 25 years and is very stable. The very reduced pallet, the CLT structure, the hardboard walls that wrap along all of the longitudinal walls and all of the recycled rimu which are the only two materials in the house, they run on all the cross walls so there's a very simple diagram of how the materials are laid out. While it's powerful and grand it's also very warm and cosy. Above the ensuite and behind the kitchen is a loft which has a multi-function space and is often used for yoga or for additional sleeping places. The large volume, the kitchen sitting at one end and living and dining spaces being contained but also the large sliding doors out to the west means that we spend a lot of time outside. It's been a real pleasure having the opportunity to explore ideas and innovations that are fundamental to our practice at the studio and then to see it and enjoy it in its concrete form is very special.