The Boat House

A notional shed on a jetty above a beach on Kawau Island.

- Simon Farrell-Green

Bon Accord Harbour is long and deep, cutting more than halfway through Kawau Island, at the northern edge of the Hauraki Gulf. You travel by boat from Sandspit across Kawau Bay and through the heads, into a harbour that’s sheltered on three sides from the prevailing winds.

It’s the harbour that boat owners make for during inclement summer weather. The rest of the year, it’s quiet – especially Harris Bay, next to Schoolhouse Bay, where you’ll find a bach designed by Sam Caradus and Ken Crosson of Crosson Architects for an Auckland family. It’s a fetching spot. “You’ve got the intensity of Schoolhouse as you make your way in,” says Caradus, “and then you come into Harris and a lovely handful of houses facing the water.”

While he was at university, Caradus taught all three of the owners’ children to swim. He was reasonably fresh in the design game when the family mentioned they’d bought a site on Kawau. They had admired Crosson’s work on coastal sites, and said they’d like him to design their holiday home.

One of the owners had spent her childhood around Kawau – coming for a picnic by boat from Stanmore Bay or sailing around the Hauraki Gulf; later, she attended school camps here with her children. They wanted a beachfront property – something that was really only possible on an island – and they wanted to rough it. “If I want carpet underfoot I can have that in Auckland,” she says. “We wanted it to feel like a DOC hut.”