We don’t often associate houses in our beach towns with mystery. More often, the New Zealand vernacular extends to wooden structures on stilts seeking a peek at a view, boats on the front lawn and towels drying on railings. They’re kind of glorified tents, with everything on display: we seem to be more comfortable with shack than retreat.
Amy and Andrew Price have owned a beach section in Ōnemana on the Coromandel Peninsula for nearly two decades. They bought it when they were living in London and used it as their base during trips home. Andrew grew up in the Coromandel, and his family live nearby. It’s a charming spot: the beach is lovely, and the place has a 1970s coastal vibe. Over the years, they added a caravan, then a container bach, introducing native planting on the perimeter to create a private “surf camp”.
Eventually the couple, who own Pitch Construction, wanted to build something more permanent, so they and their kids could spend more time here. They approached architect Evelyn McNamara with a clear brief, albeit one that seems counterintuitive at first: they wanted something solid yet casual, minimalistic and built from concrete. “We wanted it to be simple, and nothing too complicated,” says Andrew. “We just wanted to live on the site the same way as we had with our surf camp.” Continues Amy: “We wanted it to be the antithesis of a beach house. We didn’t want a dark cave, but we knew it was going to be moody.”
For Evelyn, the idea immediately struck a chord, and her design achieves a unique balance, resolving the Prices’ seemingly contradictory desire for something solid yet casual. In essence, she turned to ideas more commonly seen in Southeast Asian resorts and houses, which are almost basic but often very solid and inward-looking. “I think part of it was being mindful of hanging out there in a really low-key way, in a place which is super sleepy,” says Evelyn. “We wanted it to be recessive.”
At the heart of all their thinking was a commitment to using raw materials, and to reduce everything down as much as possible. “It’s this whole idea of reductionism,” says Evelyn, “and pulling everything out. If you use raw materials, you don’t need wall linings and you don’t need all the trim. It’s about making something that is quite sculptural.”
Her design features a concrete base with a slatted timber top. In plan, it’s a T, with a long wing stretching down the southern boundary almost to the back of the site. The base of the T contains a bedroom and ensuite, leaving space for a driveway on one side and a sheltered courtyard and pool on the other. On the long arm of the T, there’s a garage, media room, laundry and open-plan living room; upstairs there are two more bedrooms, a bathroom and a study.
To help with the sense of retreat, Evelyn pushed the house quite far back, away from the road, creating a kind of sheltered sanctuary behind. This gives the living area an intimate relationship with the outside – there’s no back lawn, and the house pushes right up against the garden. “Part of it was to blur the lines between inside and outside,” she says, “there’s no backyard, which means the building has to bring the garden inside.”
Andrew and Amy liked Evelyn’s design but asked that she go further. Upstairs originally had a conventional arrangement with corridors and doors. The couple preferred the idea of big sliding partitions between rooms. They wanted a looser, more free-flowing feel than a conventional home might have. “As an architect, it’s not something you would typically suggest to people,” says Evelyn. “It’s not totally practical having 2.5m sliding walls. But they just said, ‘Well, it’s a bach.”
From the road, you see almost nothing – there are no openings, just concrete walls and timber slats. You come down past the garage and slip sideways into a covered entry porch. Through the front door, you’re pulled straight into the main living space – a concrete wall hides the open laundry. There’s a long, in-situ concrete bench on the left, with blackbutt cabinetry and a steel island.
You’re immediately drawn down the room to a line of full-height glazed pivot doors. Where sliders would pull back and open the entire wall, these frame the garden, allowing it to come inside, and giving more solidity to the room when they’re closed. You can step through them and perch on the cantilever that hovers gently above the ground. To the right, immense sliders disappear into the concrete wall, opening to a sheltered deck that leads to a round plunge pool, surrounded by planting. (During construction, Andrew was at pains to protect the existing planting, which they’ve added to since the house was completed.)
Up the steel stairs, on the second level, it’s brighter – though the unified material palette continues, with blackbutt on the walls, floor and ceiling. The partitions slide back, creating a porous kind of space where transitions and boundaries are implied rather than enforced. Carefully placed windows bring in views of established trees rather than neighbours. “We’ve all been here so long that we know where they live and how they live,” says Andrew, “so we designed around that.” (This included lowering the roof of the garage to preserve a neighbour’s sea view.)
Andrew built the house over two and a half years with the team at Pitch Construction, pulling in a collection of collaborators and friends. There’s no filler, no hiding the joins between materials; conduits in the walls house services. Window openings had to be millimetre-perfect so the aluminium joinery could slide straight in. Andrew and Evelyn drew every single cedar batten on the upper storey, moving each of them a millimetre or two at a time to make sure they lined up with the windows. Every single piece of the house had to be impeccably detailed and perfectly executed.
And somewhere along the way, the house transitioned from bach to permanent home. The Prices sold up in Tāmaki Makaurau and relocated to Ōnemana full-time, moving into the house before it was complete and camping out while Andrew finished it off.
The house is exactly what the trio envisaged. The restricted material palette was something they returned to throughout the process, with Amy and Andrew refining their possessions down to a few key pieces in similarly muted tones. “It was such an easy design process because the vision was so clear from the start,” says Amy. “It was quite liberating – it just came naturally.”
Now, the family come back to the house and close the door, turning their back on the beach and the sun. There’s a projector tucked into the living room ceiling; the kids watch movies while sitting in the pool. In winter, they light the fire. It’s quiet, calm – silent even. “The four of us just live in our own little world,” says Andrew.
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