Magical Thinking

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.

- Aimie Cronin

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.”