Residential Projects
In this major renovation and alteration to an existing house, the interior was re-planned to maximise the views to the north and east by opening the house out to a cantilevered balcony while providing a sunny afternoon family area and outdoor living sheltered from the easterly wind. A tall house, it was visually anchored to the ground using stone from the Staveley River topped off with black painted Titan panel.
A new house with majestic views sweeping from Shag Rock all the way up the coast to the Kaikouras and west across Christchurch City to the Southern Alps. The floor plan is set out to capture views from every room and to keep sun in the living areas all day. The main challenge with this project was to create sheltered outdoor areas on a site exposed to wind from almost every direction. The house is heavily insulated and features a butterfly roof shape with angled balconies to match.
A long house running east to west across the slope with the hallway partly buried into the hill allowed for a classic passive solar design while giving full access to the views across the bay to the Marlborough Sounds. Mike and Barb Guillemot wanted a home that reflected their heritage and which had a link to their previous property, which was a vineyard in the Brancott Valley. The house has five bedrooms which they use for regular family gatherings and as a B&B.
Our own home built on a challenging site, it is something of a test bed for testing ideas around solar and spatial design. The site is steeply sloping running north-south with street access only possible from one point which necessitated positioning the garaging right in the centre of the site. Cantilevering the floor to the living area over the garage meant that it became difficult to incorporate thermal mass in typical fashion, so the plan is to use water storage as active thermal mass that we can bring into the house or exclude as necessary.
A 4 bedroom family home with the added twist that the clients wished to have it in the form of a castle. After a fair amount of research due to our castle design skills being a wee bit rusty we hit on the idea of a building based on a Norman keep with Gothic renovations. This gave us the massive heavy closed forms at either end plus the turret but allowed us to integrate large open Gothic style windows to give a sunny and warm family home.