A one-room whare, this dwelling provides communal spaces for sleeping, bathing, cooking, and eating. Oriented east to west, it aligns with the rising and setting sun, offering inhabitants morning and evening porches. The whare serves the community in multiple ways — a stopover on a day’s journey or as a retreat for a family holiday — with cooking, bathing, and sleeping amenities tucked within the roof cavity.
The whare’s facades and doors are operable, opening and closing in response to the weather. Canvas screens extend around the porches, enabling exterior living even when conditions are unfavourable.
Earth is gathered and shaped around the porches, lifting inhabitants into refuge while preserving the continuity of movement through the landscape — the whare becomes a corridor within the land. The butterfly-to-gable roof, read as a fifth façade, formalises this play of compression and release: drawing the outside in, then opening it back out.
In its orientation, materiality, and form, the whare creates a dialogue with taiao (the natural world). Its roofline guides the gaze: down to Rangi (the sky), across to Tāne (the forest and horizon), and back to Papa (the earth). The dwelling is at once shelter, threshold, and vantage point — a place to move through, to pause, and to belong.