We saw a 1960s home being pulled down across the road, and watched the timber and roofing put into a skip. I thought, there must be something we can do to give them another purpose – another life.

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We decided we’d build a little studio. We’d collect the materials and base the design on what we had. We built it in my garage. We built the floor and then built the frames, then took them outside and stood them up. It wasn’t easy, but we could come together and build one day a week and on the weekend – a day a week for 17 months. There was a lot of standing and looking: how can we get this to work? I have this, how do I use it? And then we’d realise we needed something, so we were backwards and forwards on a lot of things.

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All the materials tell a story. We know where each piece came from. The vertical structure over the exterior came from a fence at a house that has been removed. We ended up purchasing the corrugate cladding. It came off an old farm shed that had been pulled down. It’s the proper old stuff. It had an old painted finish on it. We sprayed it with a mixture of water and hydrochloric acid so it’ll patina off.

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The key find was from an alteration we did to a 1960s house. They replaced some timber joinery and it was stunning, so I approached the owners and we got a set of large French doors and a sidelight out of it. Then we got a sliding gate track and made an over-wall slider – that’s key to the whole project really.

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Most people would do a rectangle with a pitched roof. We went the other way. The roof pitches two ways, so on each elevation there’s a fall in the roof, whether it’s seven degrees or three. That’s the hardest way to frame up a roof. Each rafter is a different length. For non-builders, we didn’t do it the easy way.

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It’s kind of got an exoskeleton. It’s a hand grasping an apple, an organic thing holding the form. That’s all in timber with old deck joists. The verticals were fence palings so we had to think quite hard about how to join them. That frame is square, but inside that the wall is on the diagonal. You enter the building at its widest piece and then it tapers back into the corner.

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Inside, the rimu trims were ripped down from 1930s beams. I was going to paint the floor but we left it natural. It’s perfectly imperfect. There’s no real expectation of it being a new product. It’s not like a new home, but we never had that intention. The materials you use predict the result.

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Project Doggy Bag

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Auction live from mid-March with all proceeds going to Kids in Need Waikato.

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