Timber Design Awards 2012
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Category: 1. Residential Architectural Excellence
For the innovative use of timber, resulting in a distinctive visual impact on a residential building, either stand-alone or multi-unit/multi-storey project.
- Blind Bay House
David Loughlin - www.davidloughlin.com
Blind Bay House
On designing this house on Great Barrier Island we had to acknowledge the necessity of imported materials
in a place that cannot provide enough natural materials. The use of timber framing, plywood timber panels, cedar cladding, timber sliding doors, timber flooring and the corresponding idea of the building as a kit of parts, freely assembled informs the architecture.
Catching and sheltering from the breeze informs the design, bringing the verandah floor inside the perimeter wall to provide an open room creates an inside-outside house.
Landscape and nature are unavoidable on The Barrier. The design responds to the needs to keep out the rain and sun and to reduce wind.. To retreat is pointless. The house is not seen as an impenetrable fortress, but simply something to live under. This design attempts to filter nature rather than combat it with man-made materials and techniques.
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The house shown here is less interested in the expression of technology by bolts, junctions and gaskets, but more in the overall presence of a space. In particular the way in which timber and glazing alter space by modulating light; diffusing it, reflecting it and changing its speed.
This house is totally off-grid and sustainable, lighting and water heating are provided by solar panels on the roof, drinking and washing water come from an ancient spring in the hills behind the house. Heating is from a log burning stove with wetback, firewood is from the garden. Wastewater is treated on site.
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