The Best Design Awards are a major feature of the local design calendar and some of last year's winners have toured the country to offer first-hand insights into their projects.
The 2021 series was recorded on video. Here is one from the series of twenty recorded.
DINZ Interview
Best of the Best Designers Speak® - Video - Cheshire Architects
Waiheke House
George Gregory
Cheshire Architects
In a meditative and lyrical exploration of site and materiality, Cheshire architects’ George Gregory spoke about the clients, the brief and ideas which brought about this Purple Pin award-winning Waiheke home.
Their brief was said to be short and focused: a house to embody a sense of celebration that came from the client’s work in hospitality and city based life and full of entertaining.
They wanted a house that “dined 30 but slept none of the guests”. They wanted a place to entertain but focus on relaxation. Intelligently small with investment in materials and their systems. They owned the property across a ridgeline that stretched across down to the water’s edge on the eastern periphery of Waiheke Island.
George Gregory, Cheshire Architects
The team at Cheshire’s set out about making 31 drawn versions of the house, responding to site and they all shared a stone wall that rose out of the ground.
According to George, the house is really simple: sunshade propped up at the mouth of a cave, a delicate pavilion resting up on an occupied wall.
Private baths were buried. The canopy rests on columns with its back to stone wall, the floor runs onto the lawn. The house was seen as a medium for framing simple things and creating juxtapositions between light and dark, soft and rough stone, silence and noise.
The serpentine-like stone wall reaches out from the western lawn controlling view of arrival.
A small shower room was placed within the stone wall’s depth itself. The entry of light and external environment is heavily controlled here.
The house takes delight in refocusing simple ceremonies and was described as an opportunity to explore possibilities of architecture that already existed: using quite basic and ancient materials that are, in a way, reactions to the digital age.
Thanks Designworks for the pre-drinks venue
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