Our 2017 Home of the Year is a house for a young family by a young architect in a provincial town – and yet it has much to teach city dwellers about how to live.
Walking through the township of Cambridge in the heart of provincial Waikato, a building appears that strays far from the norm. It sits surrounded by a supermarket, a carpark and a mishmash of shops on an oddly shaped 315-square-metre section alongside service lanes and a commercial building. The home of Grant and Karen Jack, an artist and a teacher, and their daughter Sadie (four) is an intriguing addition to the streetscape: the family often arrives home to find people standing outside in a state of confusion, unable to work out exactly what the building is.
The whole site is wrapped with a red brick wall, off which the house’s various elements spring . Bold hints at what goes on behind it pop up at different angles, with flashes of more timber and brick, and corrugated steel. Architect Chris Beer says creating this sense of mystery was kind of the point. “We wanted the house to be abstract,” he says from his laneway studio in a former denim factory, just minutes away from the Jacks’ house. “It’s more about forms, and a composition of materials without the need to have conventional doors and windows. From the outside, it doesn’t really look like a house.”
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 2017 من HOME.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 2017 من HOME.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
The Past Is Present
In exhibitions at public galleries around the country, artists reflect on our collective, individual and cultural histories.
Why I Walk Carl Douglas
How the experience of walking reveals our world to us and informs our sense of our place in it.
My Favourite Building Chlöe Swarbrick
Built on Auckland’s Karangahape Road in the 1920s, St Kevin’s Arcade has served as vocational inspiration and a meeting place for the Green MP since she was a teenager.
Humble Special
PAC Studio designs a home on a tiny budget in the bush above the Kaipara Harbour.
Modern Love
Assembly Architects draws on lightweight Californian modernism to craftan elegant mountain retreat.
Family Tree
On a leafy site in the Waikato, Tane Cox crafts a subtle home for three generations
LOW PROFILE
Sometimes, strict covenants can be a blessing in disguise.
Fine Line
A house in a vineyard by Stuart Gardyne shows country living need not be rustic.
Elegant Shed
Ben Daly rehabilitates a farm building with a long family history on the Canterbury Plains.
Perfect Pitch
An encampment by an inlet casually inhabits land at Tawharanui.