This holiday house by Patterson Associates on the shore at Mangawhai is a highly crafted, beautifully detailed, sleek machine for uncomplicated living.
The curvature of the dunes conceals most of the lower half of this beach house from the road. The linearity of the corrugated roof form glints slightly like some mysterious flying object that has landed firmly on the shore.
The walking path to the house is not immediately obvious, and the tussock-like grasses, which were still in their infancy during our visit, give this sandcovered site an even more surreal personality.
Some years ago, Pattersons was approached by a couple — who reside in Australia — to create a holiday home among the golf links of Tara Iti. The house was to be a minimalist space, a sort of encampment to spend the night while the days were devoted to the golfing opportunities next door.
“It’s not a big entertaining house,” says project director Surya Fullerton, “it’s a retreat. They’ve got two workspaces — a kind of ‘his’ and’ hers’, and also matching bedrooms at either end of the house.”
On plan, the house is as simple as it gets: a long rectangle running north to south, with extensive glazing to the east to make the most of the ocean views. The two bedrooms occupy opposite ends and have a bathroom each, a little den or study adjacent, and a mixture of robes or laundry. The centre of this elongated form is left nearly empty — an open-plan dining and living space that, when the sliding doors east and west have been thrown open, doubles as a stunning visual corridor to the links, the sea, and Little Barrier Island.
“The plan is symmetrical radially through the centre, and there are two grey pods that contain the service rooms and the bedrooms,” says Fullerton, pointing out that, when closed, all the rooms seem as if they’ve disappeared into a perfectly formed wall. “All the doors have been designed with no pin handles” — so, when they are closed, there are no distractions to the linearity and purity.
This is an interior with a very restrained palette of concrete, flat and unobtrusive cabinetry, American maple, and natural tones.
That purity seems to be the running thread here; an exactitude of symmetry and rhythm that makes the house soothing in its regularity. It is so practical and reductivist that it almost reads like apartment living at a much grander scale.
Among the impressively robust ribbon of glazing (“almost Kelly Tarlton–grade glass,” jokes Fullerton) is a very precise pattern, a grid of 4.6 metres with steel columns, structural elements, and sliding panels, all fitting within that parameter.
“So, you’ve got a bedroom that sits in one of those, and then you’ve got the ensuite that sits in the next 4.6, then the living room is two lots of 4.6, and then it’s symmetrical down to the other end.”
One of the places where this changes is in the east and west terraces outside, which, instead of angularity, are composed of a perfectly circular concrete floor that cantilevers above the sand, making it seem as if the two wings of the house are radii, or spokes.
The one-metre cantilever on the east gives the house a sort of floating feeling above the shifting, immaterial movement of the grains of sand. “This is a kind of a concrete raft sitting on the sand,” says Fullerton.
Yet behind this deceptive simplicity is an astounding level of detailing. There is a sleek craftsmanship at play here that is somehow reminiscent of automotive design. The perfectly folded, corrugated zinc on the exterior corners, the heavy-duty, blue-tinged glazing, and the concrete all lend it a muscularity, a kind of robustness that would be cold and unwelcoming were it not for the desert-like surroundings, the stunning sea, and the nearby forest, which balance the whole thing out.
The zinc that covers the façade has been pre-weathered, both to take away some of the natural shine that would be too dominating in this context and to protect it from corrosion and salt deposits.
“It will continue to weather naturally,” says Fullerton, “just gently; it won’t change much from this, but stay this natural, soft kind of grey colour.”
Another beautiful detail of the material is that, unlike similar corrugates in the market, zinc can be folded without compromising its integrity. This has allowed the architects to design the corners of the house with the same folded material, rather than having to construct metal trims, which would break the flow of this otherwise sleek machine.
“Another thing that is probably not that obvious is its hidden fixings,” says Fullerton of the zinc. “Although it’s a bit of a nod to agricultural buildings with the corrugate … this is more high-tech in the sense that it’s not riddled with screws, which you would normally see along these panels.”
Outdoor storage spaces have been discreetly tacked onto the house, camouflaged by the same zinc. Guttering and other services have been hidden away.
Much thought has been given to keeping the house maintenance free, with even the railings for the glazed doors operable to vacuum out the everpresent sand easily. The roof, although hiding several technicalities such as electric motors to operate the enormous glass doors automatically, is proportionate.
“We were looking at stripping out anything complicated,” says Fullerton, “replicating the details as much as possible, keeping the same detail all the way around, and trying not to change materials too drastically — taking the essence and giving the clients something that was easy to look after.”
By the time we depart, the subtle metallic glow of the façade seems to be changing with the light conditions. “When the sun moves around later in the day and you get the shadows on it, it is really magic,” says the architect.
Hints of colour reflect slightly against the zinc and the house, much as the sand on which it sits, shifts and morphs despite its inherent solidity.
Architecture: Patterson Associates
Build: Lindesay Construction
Words: Federico Monsalve
Photography: Simon Devitt
