Project: Seascape Retreat
Architects: Pattersons Associates
Location: Banks Peninsula, Canterbury, New Zealand
Area: 1,184 sq ft
Photographs by: Simon Devitt
Seascape Retreat by Pattersons Associates
Pattersons Associates, an Auckland-based architecture studio, have designed a beachside cottage called the Seascape Retreat in a small cove in the Banks Peninsula in New Zealand.
This 1,180 square feet home contains social areas, a sleeping room and a bathroom. Its modest size allowed the design to embed itself into a rocky escarpment, making it blend in with the surrounding environment.
Being on such a remote location, the Seascape Retreat is 100% self sustainable when it comes to water collection and waste treatment.
A small beachside cottage was designed to align with a double rock arch called “The Comb”. Unfortunately during construction the Comb collapsed into a simple rock spire by the February 2011 earthquake.
Thankfully the construction was undamaged.
The cottage is now finished. It sets into a rock escarpment in a tiny boulder strewn South Pacific Cove and is constructed largely from rock quarried near its site with insitu poured concrete floors, ceilings and precast under an earth turfed roof.
The structure is integrated into the escarpment above to protect occupants from falling debri. An interlocking geometry responding to both near and far views is lined with horizontal Macrocarpa. This forms integrated joinery, wall and ceiling panels behind double glaze low e glass in storm and shatter proof steel mullions. These use earthquake resistant sliding heads. The project incorporated an extensive reforestation and re vegetation sub project. It is a shelter designed as a honeymoon retreat for paying guests and the owners family and consists lobby, living/sleeping and a bathroom. It is a romantic hideaway, accessible only by farm track or helicopter as an all weather experience where couples can be intimate with themselves and with nature in the roar of the ocean, oblivious of demands from the outside modern world.
