Big Yet Small, And New Yet Old On The Akaroa Waterfront

Throw a stone from the deck of this holiday house designed by Aaron Paterson and Liz Tjahjana of PAC Studio, and you’ll hit a landmark.

- Matt Philp

Daly’s Wharf, Akaroa’s oldest surviving wharf, projects from the nearby seawall into Children’s Bay, terminating in a little shelter with an orange turret roof.

Paterson and Tjahjana – who designed the house in association with Dom Glamuzina of Glamuzina Architects – spent many hours on this wharf during the early design phase, contemplating how they could arrange a large, two-storey house across the adjacent building site in a way that preserved privacy, maximised views and respected the heritage neighbourhood. All while pushing a few boundaries.

There were a couple of other balls in the air. “We needed to break down the mass and form of the building,” says Paterson, who describes the site, immediately next to a busy public promenade, as narrow, with an unusually long elevation running parallel to the sea. “At the same time, we didn’t want to just spread out across the site, but to create something tall and vertical. Liz and I did a hell of a lot of elevational studies of what it would look like and how we would break it down.”

The result reads neither as monolithic or fishbowl like, but rather as a collection of ad-hoc buildings, with discrete, steeply pitched roofs that recede and advance across the site. Looking from the promenade, the form to the left with the double-gabled roof contains two upstairs bedrooms and a bathroom, with a bunkroom and a small, second living area below. To the far right, below a single-gabled roof, is the main bedroom, which overhangs a glass pavilion containing an open-plan kitchen and dining space.