Houzz Tour: "Smashed, Bashed and Broken"
In a secluded Coromandel valley, two creatives built a house from reclaimed materials that pays homage to traditional agrarian structures
Simon Farrell-Green
2 June 2016
The owners of this new house come and go from their 20-hectare property beside the Kauaeranga River, on the Coromandel Peninsula. They work in the film industry as a director and a director of photography, and retreat to these rugged hills between shoots, tending the land, raising animals and growing their own food. There is a river to swim in and steep hills to climb. They have planted thousands of natives. And when they’re not doing that, they sit and take in the extraordinary view.
Houzz at a Glance
Who lives here: A film-making couple; they split their time between this rural retreat and their Auckland apartment
Location: Kauaeranga River, on the Coromandel Peninsula
Architect: Herbst Architects
Year completed: 2015
Houzz at a Glance
Who lives here: A film-making couple; they split their time between this rural retreat and their Auckland apartment
Location: Kauaeranga River, on the Coromandel Peninsula
Architect: Herbst Architects
Year completed: 2015
It is a simple, elemental life in a valley that a century or so ago was a bustling rural community, when a small private railway ran through the valley – and a tunnel in the hill – to help with the extraction of the kauri that was logged from these hills. There were smallholdings and a sense of community; these days, there’s a settler museum to their memory, and the tunnel through the hill and very little else. The hills are slowly returning to scrub and native bush.
The owners approached Lance and Nicola Herbst a few years ago – they had always admired the practice’s work, building thoughtful timber houses that pay close attention to materials, though they wanted something a little more roughly hewn. “They wrote us a brief, which was written perfectly,” says Lance. “It wasn’t prescriptive but gave us a clear idea of what they were thinking. In that brief, one big thing was imperfect materials – they literally said ‘smashed and bashed and broken’.” They wanted a farm building, in essence, a retreat from the landscape but a place from which to view it, too.
Initially, the owners suggested making new materials feel distressed and weathered, since they work on the art department of film sets and do this frequently in their work. Such an approach didn’t quite gel with the Herbsts, who have a track record of building honest buildings without pretences or airs, but lots of integrity in their materials and construction. “We said, ‘We’re making a building, we don’t need to do that. We can go and get he real weathered, aged materials. We don’t have to fake it.’ And that’s where we started.”
The main idea of the house is that it is a big roof, floating in the landscape. On an earlier project, the Herbsts had learned that building on a rural farm property has a very different set of rules to that of the coast or city. Under New Zealand planning laws, moving earth is generally a no-no – but farmers are free to move as much earth around as they like, without gaining consent.
This freed the architects up to dig out the end of a ridge and build a long retaining wall to create a building platform – the idea of the house is that it would sit below the hillside, with a 270-degree view out over the valley. By doing this, they could bed the house into the landscape and create two very different spaces: an open-plan living area downstairs, with enclosed bedrooms upstairs.
This freed the architects up to dig out the end of a ridge and build a long retaining wall to create a building platform – the idea of the house is that it would sit below the hillside, with a 270-degree view out over the valley. By doing this, they could bed the house into the landscape and create two very different spaces: an open-plan living area downstairs, with enclosed bedrooms upstairs.
Downstairs, the view is ever-present, wrapping around the house in a particularly visceral sort of way. Materials are simple and honest – and roughly hewn: there is oiled timber with the nail holes from its previous existence unfilled, and polished concrete. The simplicity focuses the mind on the view, and the most basic elements of living: gathering firewood and making fire, catching food and cooking it. It is in this way that the house’s DNA becomes apparent. The Herbsts – who emigrated to New Zealand from South Africa 20 years ago – have often spoken of how much they have been influenced by the most basic of structures in their adopted country: sheds, barns and baches. Yet in their hands, these simple structures become beautifully resolved.
There is real drama to the house. To get there, you turn off the main highway and drive up a gravel road that winds up a valley through thick bush, flitting in and out of view. You ford the river – there is no bridge – and then come up the farm access road and around in the lee of the hillside to approach the house. Once you get there, there’s a simple gravel parking area at the top of the driveway and no real front door, in the way that traditional farmhouses often never have a proper front door, or at least not one that anyone actually uses.
It’s a rough-hewn, almost gothic kind of landscape, which encouraged the Herbsts to design an equally strong insertion into it – a departure from many of the houses the Herbsts have designed, which are often lightweight timber houses made up of decks and screens that sit lightly in the landscape. This house is a strong, geometric intrusion into the landscape, with a closed top floor enclosed in rusty corrugated-iron panels. It is at once open and closed, lightweight and strong.
It’s a rough-hewn, almost gothic kind of landscape, which encouraged the Herbsts to design an equally strong insertion into it – a departure from many of the houses the Herbsts have designed, which are often lightweight timber houses made up of decks and screens that sit lightly in the landscape. This house is a strong, geometric intrusion into the landscape, with a closed top floor enclosed in rusty corrugated-iron panels. It is at once open and closed, lightweight and strong.
On an early site visit, the owners took the architects down the valley to a barn built from rusted steel panels that had been recycled from an ancient locomotive, beaten-up and bashed, yet beautiful. “We photographed it and it just sat there in our minds,” says Lance.
But first, the Herbsts spent months developing an entirely more complicated scheme for the site, which the owners’ friend and neighbour, the sculptor Louise Purvis, nicknamed the ‘puriri moth’: a rectangular roof draped asymmetrically over the ridgeline. It was beautiful – but entirely too complicated for such a small building, demanding to build and design, and it created spaces that were bigger than the brief had called for. So they started from scratch – despite the owners having fallen in love with the concept. “We really felt responsible about the budget,” says Nicola, “so we were really pleased to pull the pin and start afresh.” (Adds Lance: “We never do this!")
But first, the Herbsts spent months developing an entirely more complicated scheme for the site, which the owners’ friend and neighbour, the sculptor Louise Purvis, nicknamed the ‘puriri moth’: a rectangular roof draped asymmetrically over the ridgeline. It was beautiful – but entirely too complicated for such a small building, demanding to build and design, and it created spaces that were bigger than the brief had called for. So they started from scratch – despite the owners having fallen in love with the concept. “We really felt responsible about the budget,” says Nicola, “so we were really pleased to pull the pin and start afresh.” (Adds Lance: “We never do this!")
In starting from scratch, the Herbsts went back to the idea of the barn, remembering the rusty steel building in the valley they’d seen so early on in the process. The positioning of the house didn’t change, and nor did the idea of a long retaining wall or the overall program. But by abandoning the ‘moth’ they could make the house smaller and more simple, and therefore easier and cheaper to build – very quickly they settled on the idea of cladding the top of the building with corrugated iron – in essence, the top floor of the house is a plywood box, with a corrugated-iron screen nailed to it.
The corrugated-iron cladding came from a former brewery in nearby Thames: they only discovered it at the last minute after months of looking, and as the prospect of making new corrugate look old began to look inevitable. It is heavier than the modern stuff, and beautifully aged, giving the house a permanence and a weight.
The corrugated-iron cladding came from a former brewery in nearby Thames: they only discovered it at the last minute after months of looking, and as the prospect of making new corrugate look old began to look inevitable. It is heavier than the modern stuff, and beautifully aged, giving the house a permanence and a weight.
Behind the screen, the top floor of the house – which contains two simple bedrooms – is almost completely closed, except for small blade windows that open in the facade, allowing light and air in, as well as a glimpse of the view. Other architects might have been tempted to punch holes in it for windows: not the Herbsts. “We just had this really pure geometry, and we could feel it in the drawings, how it was floating off the ground,” says Lance. “It became really apparent that we wanted to keep that skin really taut, all the way around.” And, notes Nicola, the agrarian structures the house references would never have had windows in them. “And they’re beautiful for that reason – the shape isn’t disturbed by arbitrary apertures.”
The solid top also allowed them to make the bottom very open, despite the fact that the house sits on a very open ridge, in an area where winter storms bring gale-force winds – the owners were particularly worried about this, having watched whole houses get torn to shreds further up the valley. In response, the Herbsts engineered the house to hurricane level. The timber posts between the windows have external (and weathered, of course) steel fletches, which give them additional strength, as do the steel cross-braces across each window, the structural elements acting as a sort of calliper over the light-weight ground floor.
The Herbsts often try to design a house with one solid wall, and usually in a living area, in order to give a sense of enclosure and containment. This house has none of that and yet the ground-floor living area doesn’t feel exposed. Instead, the living area is two steps down from the kitchen and dining area, centred around a heft concrete fireplace, beside which the owners’ dog curls up at night. Above, the closed wooden volume is enclosing and comforting, rising up above your head. “Because it’s so heavy, the full weight of that roof traps space below it,” says Lance. Result? Even in a howling storm – and there have been a few since the house was completed – the owners feel snug and comfortable.
During the summer months, though, the living areas open up completely to the elements with sliding wood-and-glass doors. The kitchen is simple, with open timber shelving and a solid timber bench, built by Purvis’s partner cabinet-maker Kirsty Winter.
The owners spent months sourcing everything from the Oregon pine trusses in the living room to second-hand taps. Once the materials were on site, an engineer had to strength-test each and every piece: every beam in this house has been pored over by building inspectors to make sure it’s strong enough in a process that is the opposite of standard lengths of timber which come with their strength and capabilities already established.
Elsewhere, materials were left outside to weather naturally – the steel reinforcing plates and cross-braces on the downstairs windows were left to their own devices for a few months to rust naturally and then left, rather than being cleaned up and painted. “You don’t have to make fake rust,” says Lance. “You can just let it rust.”
The owners spent months sourcing everything from the Oregon pine trusses in the living room to second-hand taps. Once the materials were on site, an engineer had to strength-test each and every piece: every beam in this house has been pored over by building inspectors to make sure it’s strong enough in a process that is the opposite of standard lengths of timber which come with their strength and capabilities already established.
Elsewhere, materials were left outside to weather naturally – the steel reinforcing plates and cross-braces on the downstairs windows were left to their own devices for a few months to rust naturally and then left, rather than being cleaned up and painted. “You don’t have to make fake rust,” says Lance. “You can just let it rust.”
In the bathroom, the owners’ friend Louise Purvis treated copper panels with acid, which aged them in a particular way – they match the timbery hues of the wall linings elsewhere in the house. All the fittings were second hand – right down to the taps and the shower rose.
Between the living area and the retaining wall behind the sliding timber door you can see here is ‘the cave’ – an enclosed space that runs along the back of the house and extends beyond it. “They wanted a kind of in-between space between inside and outside, but quite utilitarian, for the washing of vegetables, the hanging of meat, letting the dogs hang out if the weather is bad,” says Nicola. “It’s like an outside mudroom. That’s the quirk – the rest of the house is very rectilinear and very constrained.”
Here, the floor is made from a quirky layer of half-rounds, made from the same timber (treated pine) as the retaining wall behind it. It was, says Lance ruefully, supposed to be a quirky and easy way of lining the floor in the mud room that didn’t just involve pouring a concrete slab – but turned out to be the opposite.
The builders laid 300mm lengths of pine on their ends, then packed them with a dry mix of concrete before applying water and leaving it to set. Each piece had to be cut individually, and each end had to be perfectly flat so that it didn’t create an uneven walking surface – a Sisyphean task that no one anticipated. It was worth it, though: the cave has a wooden, warm sort of feeling where a concrete floor would have been hard and noisy.
The builders laid 300mm lengths of pine on their ends, then packed them with a dry mix of concrete before applying water and leaving it to set. Each piece had to be cut individually, and each end had to be perfectly flat so that it didn’t create an uneven walking surface – a Sisyphean task that no one anticipated. It was worth it, though: the cave has a wooden, warm sort of feeling where a concrete floor would have been hard and noisy.
The house is increasingly self-sufficient, too. The owners grow a lot of their own food, while trees on the property provide firewood for heating. Rainwater is gathered on the roof and stored in massive tanks under the house, while sewerage is also treated on site – a common solution in many parts of New Zealand. While it is connected to the grid for its electricity, solar panels up the hill power its hot water and the owners may consider taking the house completely off the grid in the future.
Since the house was finished in 2015, the owners have spent more and more time there – initially, their idea was that this would be a second home that they would retreat to every now and then. Instead, they’ve traded their house in Auckland for a small apartment, retreating to the Kauaeranga Valley for longer and longer periods.
And – in what may be the best endorsement of all, they recently asked the Herbsts to come back and design a second cabin on the property for guests and the occasional volunteer farm worker. It will, no doubt, be as special as the main house.
TELL US
Would you build a house from reclaimed materials such as these? Share your thoughts in the Comments.
And – in what may be the best endorsement of all, they recently asked the Herbsts to come back and design a second cabin on the property for guests and the occasional volunteer farm worker. It will, no doubt, be as special as the main house.
TELL US
Would you build a house from reclaimed materials such as these? Share your thoughts in the Comments.
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It's lovely, in it's own way. The landscape is amazing; God's handiwork. I could live there easily.
Shelley, calling it a blight is unkind and unnecessary. It may not be to your liking, but that is ok. It's not for you.
WoNdErFuL....I love everything about this home!