Angle Grinder House

This one-bedroom house is located near the rim of a steeply sloping Auckland volcanic crater cone. Likely considered too hard to build on by most, we saw an opportunity for something great for the clients, my parents, who were looking to downsize when they purchased the empty section.

The initial brief for the home contained more ’wants’ than the modest target construction budget allowed, so we challenged any preconceived ideas in order to design a home specifically for their needs, likes, and idiosyncrasies of living. Every decision with regard to design and detail was scrutinized, cost, and re-evaluated, before committing to.

The orientation of the home and established surrounding planting provide shelter from strong North-East and North-West onshore winds from the Hauraki Gulf. The home takes its form from an element constituting both roof and wall planes, which fold down the slope, linking each level.

A number of years ago, I’d seen a sculpture of a roll of corrugated iron twisting down a hillside and how the ad-hoc form created interesting spaces.

Timber-clad volumes anchor the folding form and contain more intimate and inwardly focused areas. We set out to design, manage, and construct the home ourselves.

My parents and family worked tirelessly on Fridays and Weekends, calling on friends when suitable and engaging builders and subcontractors where work was outside of our abilities over a period of nine years.

Finishing materials were selected based on hand workability, adaptability, budget, handling ability, and material tactility. We approached the process and method of construction as if we could build something ourselves; we would hand fabricate parts of the building fabric on-site in smaller manageable parts (such as the cladding screens, inverted ceiling trusses, etc.) to eliminate any machine lifting.

We made a number of cost-effective but labor-intensive modifications to relatively standard building materials, lifting the level of interest and innovation of finishes, such as routing patterned grooves in timber linings and notching holes in the subfloor cladding for subfloor ventilation.