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Architects: Rafe Maclean Architects
- Area: 140 m²
- Year: 2018
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Photographs:Simon Devitt
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Text description provided by the architects. This resolutely internal house, sited on a steep and marginal site, successfully fulfils its purpose as an urban retreat. Providing compact but comfortable accommodation for four people, the small dwelling is a timely exercise in sufficiency and the optimisation of resources and opportunity.
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Designed as an efficient thermal cocoon, the house also serves as a tree house, connected through its clever positioning and carefully framed views, with the wider view and more immediate surrounds, especially the kōwhai tree for which it is named.
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The house, which was designed for the architect’s own family, is an intriguing exercise in self-experimentation – a little box of inbuilt happiness.”
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