Architecture and design: White light home sells for 900k over QV

Photo / Supplied

A house for five, and a one-car garage. This home for the future was featured by Element last year and has now sold for 900k over QV.

The Grey Lynn house designed for his own family by Richard Naish of RTA Studio - a bold and striking building in its villa-and-bungalow neighbourhood - is in the mainstream of current sustainable design practice. That is, Naish says, the house's design incorporates sustainable principles "without making a song and dance about it."

The House for Five - two parents and three young children - stretches along the front of an unusually generous section and in the rear wraps around a north-facing courtyard that looks out on large native trees that have somehow survived suburban development.

The house is long and thin. Narrow wings deployed in a horseshoe-shaped plan allow for effective cross ventilation, and a screened 'outdoor room' at the north end of the main, west-facing form is well-suited to the demands of Auckland's sticky summers.

The house's concrete slab provides thermal mass, and the house is sufficiently insulated that it requires a solitary heat pump.

Naish is an architect who is not afraid to design buildings which express his enjoyment of the possibilities of architecture. RTA's Ironbank building on Karangahape Road, for example, is a bravura exercise in which grunty elements are softened by decorative touches.

He has taken a similar approach on his own house, echoing the Victorian fretwork of neighbourhood houses in the patterns of the façade screens. A winner in the residential architecture category in the 2011Auckland Architecture Awards, the House for Five, announced the judging panel, "is an interesting and creative addition to an existing character street".

CARS
Not all of a building's sustainability has to with its construction. The patterns of occupation and use are also relevant. Naish says he designed his with garaging for only one car - a big and perhaps premature call for a three-child family (think of all those school drop-offs and sports fixtures). But he says, the goal of this self-denying design gesture is to get down to one car. And that is as meaningful move in a sustainable direction than any number of self-composting toilets.

CONCRETE
The House for Five is clad in a rain screen of white cement panels with a combination of fixed and moveable screens. Naish is frank about the sustainability quotient of the concrete panels, which give the house a façade of Mediterranean brightness.
It's true, he says, "concrete is perhaps not the most sustainable of materials in terms of its manufacture". On the other hand, the façade gets sustainable points because it is durable, does not have to be painted and is relatively easy to maintain.