Above a rising tide

[This story first appeared in the Dec 2014-Jan 2015 issue of Green Ideas magazine.]

“I would never buy a section on ground level near the sea.” Designer and sustainability researcher Amanda Yates is convinced our sea levels will inevitably rise – and with the heft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change behind her, few would argue with that. Amanda would far rather take her chances with a steep slope, as she has done here in the Coromandel. The view makes a compelling case, too. The white face of Shakespeare Cliff is to the east; Mercury Bay lies directly north; and this bush-clad site is tucked into a pocket of land that enjoys a warm micro climate.

Family connections also drew Amanda and her parents to purchase land here. “My aunt and her whanau have a bach around the corner,” she explains.

The local landscape is peppered with rocky outcrops – chunked shapes that lend strong character to the area around Maramaratotara, the Maori name for Front Beach and Flaxmill Bay. The house Amanda designed to be her parents’ fulltime residence aims to engage strongly with this topography. In the Maori tradition of naming special places, they called it Tokatea, meaning ‘white rock’.

Amanda is interested in the way indigenous thought can influence contemporary architectural methods. Her design has its naissance in the components of the Maori pa. She sees those platforms sculpted from the landscape, with their additional architectural elements, as an urban form – partly natural, partly cultural.

This 115sq m house references those early cut platforms. Downstairs is the main living, kitchen and dining zone and a bedroom for Amanda’s parents. Upstairs a compact studio accommodates Amanda, her partner and their two young children when they come to stay.

Tokatea seems to emerge directly from the substrate, a landscape architecture rather than a building. A waterfall of concrete envelopes two storeys as it cascades on to its hillside podium. From the roof plane, this wave of concrete folds back on itself to form an internal sloping wall and the floor of the lower level.

Although the high embodied energy of concrete means that it is not the most sustainable building material, Amanda says that “it can do a lot of good work for you”. Firth has produced an environmentally sound concrete that fits within the Living Building Challenge standard, in that the cement and aggregate components are sourced from New Zealand and satisfy the licence criteria of the New Zealand Ecolabelling Trust. The sloping cast-concrete wall makes an efficient solar sink where heat is trapped then released throughout the day. It is undoubtedly the defining feature of this space: it mimics the contour of the hillside, and ends up as a bench seat. The children love to clamber up its face and to race their toy cars back down its air-pocketed terrain.

The concrete wave ripples further into the setting to become not only a sunken Japanese-style tub in the bathroom but a capacious kitchen bench.

A use of modest materials is also a nod to Amanda’s heritage, albeit of more recent times: her father’s doctor’s surgery was designed by John Scott, a revered Maori architect, who used a lot of particle board in his work – a humble product fitting for time and place. At Tokatea, this chipboard is employed for ceilings, walls and the kitchen cabinetry. The flecked aesthetic of the material mirrors the sand of the nearby beaches “with its big particles of peach-coloured shell”, Amanda says.

Keeping costs under control was another reason for choosing to build with cheaper materials such as particle board and fibre-cement panels. Strandboard is a form of oriented particle board made in New Zealand from wood flakes bound together with a formaldehyde-free resin, so it has a green advantage, too.

The family intends to install photovoltaic and solar hot water panels in the next year or two. Stage two of Tokatea, the yet-to-be-built ‘Lotto’ stage, also involves creating a garden on the roof. Rainwater is collected from the roof and channelled into a tank beneath the house. Overflow from the neighbour’s tank is also routed here to minimise stormwater runoff.

Yates certainly hopes that Tokatea will be passed down through generations of her whanau, but she embraces a wider picture, too. “Houses are like landscapes in that they hopefully will endure rather longer than people. In that way, it is inevitable that they will eventually become part of a wider collective.”

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This story was reproduced with permission from Green Modern by Claire McCall. Published by Penguin Group NZ. RRP $65.

Copyright © text Claire McCall, 2014. Copyright © photography Matthew Williams, 2014.
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