E-Type House
This is a house for a family of five in the inner city suburb of Grey Lynn, Auckland. The empty site was purchased on the edge of Grey Lynn Park steeply rising from the street in an east-west direction leaving the long boundaries with north and south aspects. The brief was for a family house to span the evolution of the family from infancy to teenage years.
The immediate and surrounding slopes of Grey Lynn are populated with mainly Victorian and Edwardian villas with some bungalows. In response to this context we have sought to modulate an appropriate series of forms with a scale and proportion that sits comfortably on the wider hillside and immediate streetscape.
The planning and formal response has been to arrange a series of 3 discrete 2 storey ‘huts’ that step up the site peeking views in a north easterly direction over the park. This leads to an E-shaped plan containing 2 north facing courtyards exposing east, north and west faces of the house to solar gain and daylight. The courtyards extend from 2 interior ‘garden rooms’ afforded by the spacing of the huts. The upper level of each hut corresponds to the lower level of each uphill hut. A circulation spine connects all three huts on the south side of the site.
Materials are generally timber and concrete block. Cedar weatherboards wrap continuously from outside to inside around each hut further reinforcing the 3 discrete huts on the interior ‘street’.
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