Go with the flow
Home » Magazine » Good, issue 6 » Go with the flowThis Waipu beach house has indoor-outdoor flow cornered
ABOVE: The low-maintenance exterior of cedar, ColorSteel and aluminium will withstand anything the weather throws at it, eliminating the need for regular refinishing and the waste and environmental damage this entails
Building a new home is fraught with compromise—storage space versus floor area; kitchen budget versus bathroom budget—but never more so than when building an eco-home. Engineering requirements and consent issues must be weighed against complex energy calculations, ethical and environmental considerations, and computer models for weather of all seasons—then, of course, the inevitable budgetary constraints.
And so it was that Angus and Colleen McCulloch concluded—against the advice of their Ebode design team—that double-glazing for their Waipu Cove home would be struck from the ‘must have’ list and replaced with single-glazed, tinted glass.
The couple’s cost-conscious decision wouldn’t be tested until their first winter in their new home. Lucky for them, the designers were one step ahead: the pitch of the roof lets the winter sun flood inside, while shielding the house from summer’s midday heat. “In winter all the light angles are absolutely perfect,” says Angus. “The place warms up nicely.”
Heat from the fireplace is soaked up by the concrete block chimney structure, which continues to release heat long after the fire goes out. Super-insulated ceilings and walls, in excess of building code requirements, ensure that despite skimping on the glazing, Angus and Colleen stay warm right through winter.
“I know the value of double-glazing, but I don’t miss it in this house,” says Angus, an ex-fireman who juggles real estate sales with relief teaching.
But despite its winter cosiness, this is a beach house, at its best during the long days and warm nights of summer. One corner of the home opens up completely, a spectacular engineering feat that affects the feel and flow of the entire house.
It wasn’t always planned that way. Playing around with an early computer model of the house, Angus and Ebode’s Niel de Jong decided to have a go at engineering the corner without a supporting element. It meant introducing a steel beam to the otherwise all-timber framing of the house, but it worked … for better or worse.
Low-VOC products were specified indoors: eco-ply ceilings, natural wool carpets, Resene paints and New Zealand plantation-grown saligna floorboards. Low-energy lighting is used throughout
“It took quite a bit of engineering, and it did add a significant cost to the construction and delayed getting the consent,” Angus admits.
“If I’d known at the beginning how much extra work it was going to be, I probably wouldn’t have done it.”
But now that it’s done, the decision is impossible to regret. With one full corner open, it’s like being outside wherever you are in the living area. “You always feel like you’re out in the open here, without being exposed to the elements.”
“We interact with the environment the whole time we are in the house. You’re very aware of the weather even though you are protected from it, and then on hot days you open the place up and get tui flying through the lounge.”
Although it’s small—just 110 square metres—the McCulloch’s two-bedroom, two-bathroom house feels spacious and airy. The living, dining and kitchen area is almost double-height at the apex of its angled roof.
Towering pohutukawa on neighbouring properties give the house some privacy—worth the sacrifice of what would otherwise have been an unobstructed view of the sea, reckon Angus and Colleen.
The house is just metres from Waipu Cove beach, one of New Zealand’s safest surf beaches. Bikes, surfboards and kayaks pile up outside the back porch. A ‘wet room’ for rinsing sandy bodies and salty wetsuits is just inside the back door. The laundry is hidden behind sliding doors off the porch, opening onto a covered area perfect for a drying rack on a rainy day.
Water for the home is solar-heated, and there are plans to collect rainwater for the small veggie garden, toilet and laundry—another early specification sacrificed in the interests of time and budgetary constraints.
“Life is compromise. It’s about moving towards a goal,” says Angus, who remains keen to install water collection tanks in future. He knows Ebode would have liked the house—one of the design company’s first builds—to have moved further along the green spectrum, “but we’re really comfortable with where we’re at.”
“It’s all a matter of scale. If you’re doing the best you can in your little patch, then that’s a positive thing. You can’t change the world in five minutes. Just do the little things you can, and see what happens.”
There’s a purposefully bach-like quality to the home, which will eventually be let to holidaymakers. Angus and Colleen plan to build a second house on the front section, big enough for their three adult daughters and their families to come and stay.
But they’ve been in this house a year, “and we’d quite happily live here forever,” says Angus.
