A Barefoot Love Shack For Two On A White-Sand Beach

Otama is one of the most perfect beaches on the Coromandel Peninsula.

- Simon Farrell-Green

There’s squeaky white sand and gentle rolling surf, an estuary and bleached grassy hills behind. It’s three hours from the nearest city over narrow, winding roads and, until recently, the road from State Highway 25 was unsealed and occasionally treacherous. Sometimes, in the middle of summer storms, the one-lane bridge floods.

Architect Ken Crosson knows the area intimately. His own bach – the winner of both our Home of the Year in 2003, and Home of the Decade in 2006 – sits on a hill at one end, with a commanding view over the Mercury Islands. So when he was approached by the owners of this site to build a house in the dunes, tucked into a nook at the other end of the beach, he was justifiably nervous about what the community would think.

The site runs down through the dunes to a beautiful little corner of sand; a track runs through the spinafex and most of the land appears to belong to the beach, rather than a private owner – something the architect and his clients were keen to maintain. There’s no front fence, no boundary between what’s private property and what’s not. “It’s kind of nice to let the public realm be the public realm,” says Crosson, who designed a small beach house that occupies a vastly smaller footprint than he could have legally built, pulled as far back against the hill as possible. “We were all keen on that. The owners are very quiet people, and they didn’t want to show off.”