A Sustainable City Home Built On A Tiny Site Opens To A Garden Of Trees

The high-level aims of the brief were to create a family home for a small family, which is actually my family, and to move somewhere closer to the inner city where my children could go to school. As is often the case with infill housing, we're surrounded by neighbours on all sides. So the design strategy was to turn our back to the neighbours and focus on natural light and optimising the view of the greenery. The exterior materials on the house are a white, soft brick that has a handmade quality to it, which is contrasted with a silvered cedar. The form was derived from a small footprint, and to get the space that we needed, we needed to build up and outwards. So different boxes for different spaces converged and moved up the site and pushed in and out, and creating angulation and undulation. We decided to use big sliding doors that open right up out towards the trees, so that when you're in this living space, you almost feel like you're outside or in an outdoor living space. On the northern elevation, we created a rhythm of openings. This gives a nice colonnading effect, but also mitigates the solar gains from the northern aspect. As a practice, we think it's important to design with sustainable outcomes in mind. In New Zealand, we mostly have renewable energy sources, and we think it's important to use those sources where possible. Provided that the origin is renewable, electricity is a good way to do that. Driving electric cars is a good way to make the most of that, and to minimise our carbon footprint. We chose induction cooking because it's powered by electricity. It's also safer than gas, and personally, I prefer to cook with it. You know what you're going to get every time, you get used to the settings, you get even instantaneous heat, and I think we really need to embrace this technology. This type of housing is going to become more common, utilising electrification is also going to become more common. In this project, we feel that we've achieved the outcomes that we wanted to, which were creating a generous feeling, private space, in a compact, surrounded environment.