When a young couple based in Pōneke/Wellington decided they’d had enough of their busy schedule juggling a bungalow renovation with burnout, they made like the reality-TV show and escaped to the country. The first step of their lifestyle change was to buy a section in the Wairarapa. Happily landing on a site in Kahutara, they felt as if it was all coming together, although finding someone to design their new home proved to be less easily achieved — until…
ABOVE Joinery from First Windows & Doors (with a silver anodised finish and mostly Icon hardware, with some Elemental hardware used in the dining area) melds with the home’s steel cladding. Here, the minimal intervention of an APL Architectural Series over-the-wall slider makes for seamless movement between the main living space and the path that runs around the house. “A takeaway from this project is how to deal with the transition from big, open space to intimacy,” says Ben. Concrete pathways create that delineation, with the plants on the house side tamed and those on the paddock side left to grow wild. The path also forces cars away, so the approach is on foot and the arrival isn’t dominated by a garage.
“Years before, we’d seen an article in the local paper about two young architects who’d designed and built a house for themselves in Whanganui,” says one of the homeowners. “Time went by, then up popped another inspiring project by the same pair in Pōneke. On both occasions, we’d admired how they’d lived and breathed these builds — and that was how we decided to approach Sally Ogle and Ben Mitchell-Anyon of Patchwork Architecture to design a house for us.”
Being of similar ages, the couple found Sally and Ben to be more approachable than some of the other architecture practices they’d contacted. “It can be quite an intimidating process — at times it felt like we were interviewing to be the client, rather than the other way around!” says the homeowner. “Once we’d spoken with Sally and Ben, though, we were assured that their approach responded to what we were after.”
TOP Metro Series fixed raked windows with awning windows below them allow you to feel at one with the environment in the living space. Such attention to detail was key to making this home really sing, and Sally puts some of the success of that down to having fantastic builders, Fathom Build, and joiners, SB Joinery. MIDDLE & ABOVE The home’s material palette is purposefully simple, including “gypsum for the ceilings and walls, and the concrete floor that’s just a kelly-float finish like in a supermarket,“ says Sally. “What’s cool about Wairarapa is that being inland, not coastal, meant the building could be clad in corrugated, galvanised steel, because it won’t be corroded by salt. You can’t really do that anywhere else.” Outside of this simplicity, she says, “there are the more special bits, like the kitchen bench that’s flush with the window joinery, giving a frameless view.”
The vision? A striking silhouette that would suit the surrounding rural landscape. Presented in a concise brief that outlined the practicalities (a bedroom, a bunkroom, a home office) but was aesthetically open-ended, it was an architect’s dream. Thinking big on a small budget is what Patchwork has become known for, through their portfolio of clever homes that seek to shrink environmental footprints while creatively using common, cost-effective materials.
TOP “We had blades made for a milling machine to profile timber for an earlier project, so we reused it to create grooved boards that we laid vertically and horizontally to create the tukutuku pattern,” says Ben of the sliding wall. ABOVE Minimal, mid-century-inspired and with a sense of ease, all of the interior items in this home have a story behind them. “When we met Ben and Sally to review the first iteration of the house, I had an epiphany about spindle-back chairs — a Modernist take on farmhouse furniture,” says the homeowner. “I spent years keeping an eye out for them, then recently stumbled across a set of six Ercol chairs right here in Wairarapa! Having them restored locally was worth every penny.”
“This had to be a reasonably straightforward structure and shape because of the budget,” says Ben. “After visiting the site, a paddock, our first response was, ‘There aren’t any constraints — what do we actually do here?!’”
“That sounds as if it should be freeing, but it’s actually super difficult,” says Sally. “It’s not how we’re used to working.”
TOP, MIDDLE & ABOVE “The patio is like an ensuite, and out here we have the luxury of privacy and being able to get naked and jump in the outdoor bath,” says the homeowner. Metro Series stacker sliding doors make nudie runs back to the main bedroom a breeze. “A reoccurring theme across lots of our projects is covered outdoor space, not just as an in-between, but to extend the footprint of the house,” says Sally. “That’s a big part of this home. We’re interested in this as useful space, to add cheaper space and to modify the climate. This is an extra room, but it doesn’t cost the same as building another 20 square metres inside your house.”
Compared to tackling urban sites on which limitations inform the starting point, this home saw Sally and Ben taking their approach back to basics with the kind of site analysis they teach you in architecture school —reviewing the wind, the sun and the view.
“The most obvious thing was the beautiful scene of the hills to the southeast in the mornings and strong sun to the northwest in the evenings,” says Ben. “To embrace that, we’ve explored the idea of deep farm verandahs with diagonally opposite outlooks.”
ABOVE Because it gets so hot in the Wairarapa, the couple use this eastern patio all the time; in summer, it becomes their lounge. Ben says, “I nerd out on the verandah ceiling”, which came about via design decisions related to cutting the corner off. “I feel like it’s a nice playful detail — a reminder to look up.”
An S-shaped, 128m2 footprint adjoins two outdoor rooms that link to the home’s interior through joinery from First Windows & Doors. From each end, the building feels similar to a symmetrically pitched barn. As a twist on that vernacular, the gabled roof is clipped back in line with the triangular verandahs, making the simple form more dynamic and providing a gradient of protection. The majority of the glazing is contained in the verandahs, where doors are utilised for both access and ventilation that’s protected from wind and rain.
TOP, MIDDLE & ABOVE Facing southwest, this side of the house is shut off to the environment bar a pair of APL Architectural Series over-the-wall sliders accessing the bunkroom and bathroom. In high summer, the closure makes sense. “You realise when you build a new house that’s well sealed, insulated and double glazed that it functions in a completely different way [to what we’re used to in New Zealand],” says Sally. “Suddenly, you don’t need to get every last ray of sun into the house for it to be warm and comfortable.”Key to the layout was the owners’ intention for their home to flex between functioning for the two of them and hosting whānau and friends — thus the well-considered living spaces do double duty for a range of activities and occasions. The office is especially hard- working. “It’s a massive space that acts as our studio, my sewing and upholstery room, a video-game room, a playroom, a karaoke room, a function room, a dancefloor and, if needed, a marae,” says the homeowner. “We’ve filled it with photos of our tūpuna [ancestors], our whānau, and my marae in Kohukohu.”
A 4 x 4m sliding wall/door accesses this zone from the wider open-plan area. Finished in a tukutuku pattern, “it pays homage to my whakapapa and Māoritanga. It’s our heart, right in the middle of our home,” says the homeowner. “We had an opportunity to make this large wall/door something really special, and chose the poutama pattern because of its meaning. The stepped pattern symbolises levels of attainment and the growth of man striving ever upwards, but for us personally, when we look at this pattern, we see it being the stairs to heaven and think about our loved ones we’ve lost who now reside there. Sometimes in the morning, the sun hits the door just right and the stairs light up, reminding us that with each step we take in life, we’re closer to seeing them again.”
TOP “There are some other little details that most people wouldn’t notice, but that make me smile when I see them,” says Ben. “Take the window heads of the sliding doors, particularly the over-the-wall sliders, for which we used a macrocarpa timber reveal and sloped it up on the same angle as the roof pitch, so you get a seamless transition between the reveal and the ceiling. We’re trying hard [with our designs] to reduce junctions altogether. If you can get away without an extra material, without an in-between thing, which is much harder than it sounds, we think that’s a better detail.” ABOVE “Another good thing about using galvanised cladding is that almost everything comes in galv,” says Ben. “You can have a bolt or a piece of rebar, all the fixings, nails and screws, and they’re all hot-dip galvanised, so it’s easy to be cohesive. For a material that’s probably thought of as shiny, it actually softens quite quickly. Its subtle reflectance picks up the colors and light around it beautifully.”Now that the build is complete, the couple’s settling into the rhythms of country life. Thanks to a newfound passion for taking their ride-on mower for a spin, they’ve been loving getting out to cut tracks through the wavy, golden rye grass. Life here is about keeping it real in a relatively humble abode so thoughtfully and efficiently designed that the greatest luxury of all can be enjoyed to its fullest — time to just be. firstwindows.co.nz
![ABOVE “There are some other little details that most people wouldn’t notice, but that make me smile when I see them,” says Ben. “Take the window heads of the sliding doors, particularly the over-the-wall sliders, for which we used a macrocarpa timber reveal and sloped it up on the same angle as the roof pitch, so you get a seamless transition between the reveal and the ceiling. We’re trying hard [with our designs] to reduce junctions altogether. If you can get away without an extra material, without an in-between thing, which is much harder than it sounds, we think that’s a better detail.”](https://homestyle.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/homestyle_firstwindows_patchwork_19.jpg)
