This case study was produced in association with:
HERE Magazine / hello@thisishere.nz / thisishere.nz
When Alex McLeod of at.space interior studio and husband Greg, of Eco Outdoor, settled on the final design for their new house in Maungawhau, they were adamant the house would feature Luca Crazy Paving through both the ground floor living spaces and the outdoor areas. Eco Outdoor is the local importer for the distinctive stone flooring product, and using it both inside and out had been a dream of Alex’s for years.
McLeod and architect Natasha Markham collaborated closely on the design of the house over a period of 10 years, devising a calm, considered home loosely inspired by childhood memories of McLeod’s grandparents’ house. Built to a rational grid and consisting of two boxes linked by a long gallery overlooking the pool, the house features a sophisticated palette of natural materials that features inside and out, including stacked Pendell limestone batons – also supplied by Eco Outdoor – and cedar sarking on the walls, inside and out.
This presented some early challenges for builders Faulkner Construction – not least because installing the floor needed to happen in the early stages of the construction process, rather than at the end. “There was a consider-able amount of coordination required across all the trades that were affected during the installation process,” says Faulkner project manager Adriaan Kant. “The Luca flows from indoor to outdoor, so meeting the external moisture requirements of the building code while maintaining the seamless indoor-outdoor flow required by our clients and architect was definitely part of the challenge.”
Though before that happened, they had to deal with excavating Maungawhau volcanic rock before the concrete footings, floor slab and swimming pool could be formed. Inside blurs into outside seamlessly here, and the crazy paving flows out to the patio to form the surround for the swimming pool – all of which also needed to be dug and prepared ahead of the ground floor slab.
The setup for the concrete was very technical, with a concrete nib wall around the perimeter of the slab to contain the Luca and the mortar bed it was laid on, while ensuring the correct finished floor levels were achieved inside and out.
The finished floor level in the snug was also lower than the rest of the house, requiring additional excavations and waterproofing, while the slab for the patio outside the snug is actually cantilevered over a feature water pond – so even the concrete form-work on this job was elaborate.
With the slab poured, the next challenge was the exposed, stained timber glu-lam beams in the main living room and snug, which are key to the building’s structure, and needed to be installed early in the build – and then worked around carefully by countless trades throughout the process.
The finished home is “comparable to a piece of fine art or sculpture”, reckons Faulkner director Ross McConnell.
“There’s fine detail everywhere you look.” From day one, he reports, the build required all of the stakeholders
to commit to the building process with patience and integrity.
In all, there are 8749 lineal meters (8.75 km) of cedar and more than 12,000 individual limestone batons, which required many hours of painstaking work. “While the final impression is quite subtle and orthogonal, the attention to detail required to achieve that outcome was intense, especially where the timber craft-work interfaces with the stone and tile,” says Ross. “There’s a lot of devil in the detail that can’t be fully expressed in the architectural plans, so it really was a creative and collaborative process between builder, architect and interior designer.”
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ARTICLE IN ASSOCIATION WITH: HERE