Maple Courtyard House
Maple Courtyard House
2020, Christchurch
Photography Credit: Stephen Goodenough
This house is set on a quiet suburban cul-de sac, on a site chosen by the client for their love of the established Japanese maple street trees and overview of a nearby stream.
The design responds to the client’s brief of having a peaceful place to transition into retirement by allowing circulation through the house to ‘take its time’, and enjoy an ever changing series of vantage points into borrowed scenery or landscaped gardens.
The house is programmatically divided into two main forms that adjoin a generous double height entry gallery. All private spaces are contained within a simple gable form, and the primary living area is spatially separated by a highly glazed ‘link’ and articulated as a ‘pavilion in the garden’ overlooking the stream.
An external courtyard connects the pavilion to a secondary living space within the gable, proving a meeting point for life between buildings around a single Japanese maple.
Dual living spaces offer distinctly different characters – One an inky black introspective retreat, and the other a crisp white light filled pavilion with concrete fins directing views out to the landscape, or back to the front door.
The pavilion’s radial concrete fins express its rotation against the otherwise orthogonal planning, and signify the end of the architectural journey by reorienting circulation in a choice of new directions.
