Home Family Home Design by Irving Smith Jack Architects in New Zealand

Bach with Two Roofs is the family home design that located in Golden Bay, New Zealand, was designed by Irving Smith Jack Architects. This set of three small buildings and the spaces between provide a holiday home design for a young family within an existing eucalypt forest clearing overlooking New Zealand’s remote and picturesque Golden Bay. The brief called for an efficient and easily maintained solution to home building within a forest with inherent questions to both users and buildings from overhead eucalypts which regularly shed large branches and gumballs; the inhabitation to be easy, soft, recessive and to encourage friends and family to continue to holiday with the homeowners in the clearing.

Two buildings are inhabited; the larger for family, the smaller for friends or the kids once bigger. Sacrificial and replaceable fly roofing protects from the eucalypt trees above and collects rainwater. The third building provides independent amenities to the external spaces which are controlled in volume by the placement of buildings within and to the edge of the clearing allowing camping, shelter, frisbee etc. The buildings are set back from the sea view to sit within the privacy of the clearing, allowing the view to be de-privileged and shared by all from external spaces.

Simple peripheral decks connect the buildings to the clearing with the immediate landscaping remaining simply grassed as an open palette for tents, parking and activity. The surrounding forest enclosure remains largely unchanged with eucalypts only thinned to remnants where fallen or ailing. Materials are chosen for their blending to the surrounding bush and dappled forest light; oiled cedar, simply finished metals, eucalypt decking. Interiors are consistent and pure with dark ply wall, ceiling and joinery linings providing a sense of retreat from the clearing, paralleling the privacy afforded to the forest clearing by the forest surrounds.