OPENFIELD HOUSE
2019 - 2023
Set within the expansive mountainscape of New Zealand’s Crown Range, Openfield House exists as an object of pure geometry. Rejecting distinctions between interior and exterior spaces, the family home is designed as a vehicle for living within the natural context, a curated dialogue between organic and inorganic, a celebration of authentic connection to the earth.
Owing to a distilled concept developed in collaboration with London-based Matheson Whiteley, the spatial dynamic is limited to the necessary. It is an unfussy and honest design response sympathetic to the powerful energy of the land, underpinned by the poetic notion of connecting people to their human experience—the body and mind independently and as one.
A square plan and corrugated roof reference historical structures of the region - such as minor’s huts and agricultural sheds - with a rationalised grid to facilitate the opening and closing of interior spaces around the needs of the occupants. The plan establishes a continuous field within which several heavy concrete volumes provide groundedness among the collection of interchangeable spaces. An open fireplace anchors the building’s centre and concealed sliding joinery commits the thresholds to an openness that invites the landscape inwards. Pushing up from the ground, a solid concrete mass functions as an extension of the rocky terrain, the foundation atop which a collection of cedar boxes huddle under a simple metal roof. The considered material restraint is in service to a hierarchy of elements; the approach to materiality and construction is based on the abstract idea that if the lightweight elements were ever to come down, that which remains would be a ruin of stone objects rising from the ground.
Layered with seamlessly complex systems, the purity of the plan is given substance through elements of architectural expression. Externally hung channels suspend large glazed doors and timber screens slightly above ground level - when opened stowing precisely adjacent, at once becoming a fixture of the wall itself, blurring the distinction between the permanent and dynamic. The concrete upstand which it hungs from, Internally, a concealed door system integrates into the heirarchy of masses. This allows for an interior perimeter, akin to the traditional japanese en, free of the exterior walls. This gesture of interval between interior and exterior is mirrored externally, with a continuous path around the house, connecting and warping that which is . A knee height concrete upstand mediates the threshold around the perimeter.
Here, the design strategy serves to retain the raw energy across the site, crafting the home as a place of respite for a family with an active lifestyle, an offering akin to lying under a tree for the afternoon. Alongside essential utility, critical emphasis is placed on a raw, authentic material palette the textures and tones of which are a cohesive integration of natural stone and timber, establishing the sense that this building has always existed as a permanent fixture of the landscape.