Overview
Entrant:
Studio Pacific Architecture
Category:
08. Residential Design Award for Single Family Dwelling
Photographed by:
Simon Devitt
Key team members:
Studio Pacific Architecture - Evžen Novak, Juliet Barker, Samantha Zondag, Sarah Berry
Dunning Thornton Engineers (Structural Engineers) - Hamish Strange
Makers Fabrication Ltd (Timber Fabrication and Overall Construction Contractor) - Grant Douglas
The Matahiwi Cabin is a small one bedroom 85m2 house built on a rural site on the outskirts of Masterton in the Wairarapa.
It is designed to provide a sense of delight and use timber to create warm and inviting internal spaces within its small footprint. Timber technologies enable the cabin’s unusual curved form, deliver low-carbon construction, extend the capabilities of off-site manufacture, and respond to a site with access constraints.
The cabin achieves a low 91kgCO2e/m2 (after accounting for biogenic carbon storage in timber) embodied carbon content.
The house has a large living area with integrated kitchen and dining and a central wood burner for heating. The wood burner, book stack and storage stack separate the kitchen from living area. There is one bedroom, one bathroom and a laundry/storage nook.
A large grassed area sits in the foreground of the house extending out from the main living area. The cabin is sited so the living spaces look directly to Mitre Peak in the distant Tararua Ranges. Facing north, the cabin also captures the sun to warm the interior living spaces.
The unusual external shape gives the interior unique characteristics including an internal environment shaped especially for its users; it is one that exudes a comfortable warmth from the timber construction and the visible timber surfaces on floors, walls and ceiling.
Internally, the building evokes a sense of strength from the repeating visible structural ribs and has an unusual spaciousness created from the curved timber ceiling.
Externally, the cabin’s provenance as a series of manufactured segments assembled on site is manifest even in its non-typical singular form.
To simplify construction, reduce embodied carbon, and minimise transport weight, the cabin was conceived as an almost entirely timber structure. This includes floor, wall, and roof framing (LVL), flooring (recycled matai on ply), internal and external linings (plywood), and timber windows and doors. The insulation was originally specified as low-density wood fibre, but Covid-era supply chain issues prevented its use.
The cabin was designed to be built in easily transportable and liftable segments as the original building site had 4WD or helicopter access only. The functional need for segments is expressed as timber ribs both externally and internally.
The timber interior is particularly important for creating a sense of wellbeing and connectedness with the farm and woodland environment around the house.
The building floats above the land – no earthworks were required because of the light weight building and the foundation system used. Even the timber framed windows visibly connect to the trees surrounding the house.