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.