To listen to Jeremy Taylor's playlist inspired by this house, click here. The Ōtahu River flows northeast from a number of streams inland of Whangamatā, on the eastern side of Coromandel Peninsula. As it approaches the beach, it widens and turns into a particularly lovely estuary. Fringed with pōhutukawa, this is a quiet corner of an otherwise bustling beach town, where the houses have flat lawns, a humble scale, gardens. “It’s quite a sleepy area, but it’s beautiful,” says Oli Booth, of Oli Booth Architecture, who got to know the place as a teenager, visiting the bach of family friends.
The couple had holidayed in the area for many years. They bought the section here back in 2010, which came with a bachy kind of garage on it. Booth remembers them renovating the place, adding a few cabins to the expansive front lawn. It was a loose arrangement of buildings, glorified camping really. Encouraging lots of time spent in the open air, it had a bathroom accessed from outside and a big covered deck. “He did a really nice job of it,” says Booth.
It’s a familiar story, and one being played out in beachside settlements around the country. By 2018, they were looking to spend more time at the bach, potentially to live there permanently or at least for longer stretches. They approached Booth – now a fully fledged designer in his own right – to design them something more suited to regular occupation, particularly in winter. They didn’t want to build too much – they didn’t want a suburban house at the beach.
At one point in time, a bach was a bach, and you went there to switch off, probably after driving several hours over terrible roads, and then you went back to your everyday life. There is a pleasure to that, a sense of retreat and withdrawal that is often lost completely when you go to build something more permanent. Here, they determined early on to keep the bach, and build as little as possible on the front of the section. The old place was well-maintained, conveniently sited right at the back of the property, and it came with fond memories of holidays past. “They didn’t need lots of bedrooms most of the time,” says Booth. “It’s really only when family comes and the place fills up.”
The next step? “We started off talking a lot about these ideas of exposure,” says Booth. To get the conversation going, he developed a document of possible references. This included buildings by John Scott and early baches by Lance and Nicola Herbst on Aotea Great Barrier Island, as well as the Dog Box by Patchwork Architecture. They’re structures that deliberately send you outside on a regular basis and which feature small-scale rooms and honest materials combined with generous outdoor space.
Booth’s approach was to draw a big square on the site, which happened to be the maximum available building area once you accounted for setbacks and planning rules. From there, he carved out spaces both inside and out, ending up with four small pitched-roof boxes joined by flat-roofed links, spread out down the lawn and connected to the old bach via gardens and a boardwalk.
The front box contains a garage and laundry. You enter the house into a glassy link. In a very definite sense, it feels more like a gate than a front door. You’re held here between a box housing the primary bedroom suite, and another that contains a guest bedroom with a large window seat and ensuite. Further in, behind the guest room is a snug living space connected to the kitchen box by a flat-roofed dining area. Off that is a covered outdoor living space, which flows to a garden, and then the bach.
The central covered boardwalk, the spine of the home, became a unifying idea – the thing that defined the whole project. Pivot doors and over-wall sliders allow the openings to subtly disappear, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, old and new. “We wanted to have this connection right through the house to the existing bach,” he says. “So we worked up this idea of the verandah being a ribbon that kind of stitched these independent clusters together, rather than dominating the site with one big house.”
Fin walls of unpainted concrete block define the interior spaces, holding you as you come into the house. They provide a solid bone structure that’s fleshed out with planes of honey-coloured birch ply on the walls, ceilings and doors. It’s a textural palette – warm and enclosing. Rooms are small, just big enough for their purpose, but with soaring pitched ceilings and offset windows that bring in glancing rays of sunlight. “I think that’s part of retaining some sense of the bach,” says Booth. “So often the scale is something that’s lost.”
Built-in furniture, including window seats and a big L-shaped sofa in the living area, provides places to sit and contemplate throughout – a coffee in the sun, say, or a moment by the fire in winter. “Often it’s an easy one to remove because of cost, but they really bought into it,” says Booth. “I think it makes all the difference. With small spaces, you either need to design specifically to pieces of furniture or make it from scratch.”
Two things happened over the course of the project. Possibly predictably, the couple decided they would, indeed, like to live here full-time, selling up in Kirikiriroa and settling in Whangamatā permanently. And the new building, which was originally going to be black to match the old bach, was clad in timber, which is slowly silvering off to grey. In response, they reclad the bach in unpainted fibre-cement sheets, and replaced its joinery with aluminium to match the dark new place. And so, in a respectful, gentle sort of process, the two structures met in the middle, a collection of small-scale buildings united by a flat grassy lawn. There’s poetry in that.
1. Garage
2. Entry
3. Bedroom
4. Ensuite
5. Living
6. Dining
7. Kitchen
8. Laundry
9. Deck
10. Outdoor Dining
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