The Great Cheviot Adventure, Chapter III
Published on Friday, July 7th, 2006, under Media
The Great Cheviot Adventure, Chapter III
I haven’t heard of too many architect-farmers, but here we are, house-sitting on our client’s farm. Rachael and I just presented the final schematic design to them before they went off to the sub-tropical island of Tonga for two weeks. The run of the range is pretty easy as far as farms go. After feeding the chickens and collecting a solitary egg, I took the dogs out for a run on a 4×4 bike, ripping across green fields and roaring up and down muddy tracks. Heck yeah, I could get used to being a farmer. Well, there’s probably a few more things to learn. For example, what do you do when you find a sheep running loose?
There she was, a lone ewe munching on grass, thinking all the world was a peaceful green dream when I came blazing down the track with five dogs running, barking, and drooling ravenously alongside me (they hadn’t had a bite to eat yet, and it was late afternoon). I had no idea how the sheep had got out of her paddock, but the dogs went straight to her. They surrounded the ewe, and I thought, being trained sheepdogs, they would know what to do. Of course all they saw was a wooly, massive lamb chop on four legs. Before I knew it two of them were biting at her neck, and another chomped on her face, drawing blood. I leapt off the bike and yelled at the dogs, but the ewe was still running away and the dogs terrorizing her. I decided the only way to save this ewe was to get the dogs away and back in the kennels, and I realized I could at least start driving away and shout for them to follow, which they did (being well-trained sheep dogs, just a little hungry). Back in they went, one of them licking his leg which was dappled with sheep’s blood… As for the ewe, I drove back with Rachael and made sure she wasn’t too badly injured, but heck we wouldn’t even know what to do, we’re just city slickers!
It was the first sunny day in Cheviot since we returned from the North Island four days ago, our car filled to the brim with all the junk we’ve acquired in NZ, plus the sexy basswood/cardboard model we built up there. It had been a wonderful stay in the house outside Wellington. Our hosts Ric and Shar had become like family. Plus our six-week stay there coincided perfectly with a group salsa class, and how funny was that to be dancing to Latin music all the way across the globe? We managed to make some architect contacts, including meeting up with a guy I had worked with at Michael Maltzan Architecture, who has immigrated with his wife. Come to New Zealand and see how small the world is.
Anyway, the big excitement is this house that we’ve designed, and so I should explain it a bit. Rick and Trish had some sketches of a floor plan when we first met with them, plus a number of magazine clippings of houses they liked (for the architects out there reading this, that’s the great moment of dread, when the clients bring out a picture and say ‘I love this, can you design this for us?’) Luckily for us, our clients have good taste and also weren’t interested in copying things out of magazines. They wanted something personal, simple, spacious yet not huge, and a bit rough around the edges. And honestly, who wants to feel like they’re living in a hotel, or feel like they can’t make a bit of mess somewhere in the house?
The other design features we agreed on were lots of north-facing windows (remember that the sun is the other way down here), good ventilation, and potentially some sustainable design features such as storing rainwater, solar heated water and solar power. They wanted a deck that swept out to the edge of the bluff, where 18 feet below they would plant a small garden and build a BBQ pit. In addition to the living room and all the bedrooms opening out to the deck, the shower is to have a floor-to-ceiling window facing onto a small garden (which is watered by the “grey water” that drains from the bathroom).
The house was very easy to design in a lot of respects because Rick and Trish had thought things through and knew exactly what they wanted. Also, we’ve become great friends with them, and Rachael and I enjoy a lot of the same things they do. It kind of centers around cooking and eating great food, and since they used to run a restaurant, it’s still very much their passion. Rick cooks an Indonesian duck curry that just melts in your mouth… What does this have to do with house design, besides the amazing feast that we’ll have at the house-warming party? We have a good sense of what they like, where they will want to spend money and where they won’t. It’s a lucky thing we have, not just to have a commission but to have clients that value the same things we do. From what I hear, it’s indeed a rare thing.
Our departure point for the house was a simple concept, to take all of the family activities (i.e. cooking, eating, gathering by the fire) and house them under a great roof with a clerestory window and finished concrete floors, soaking up the sun’s warmth and free of walls. We call it (or rather I call it, as Rachael thinks it sounds too rough) “the living shed”. We then intersect the living shed with a more private “sleeping shed”, which is raised off the ground on piles and floored with a natural dark timber. The south wall, a long hallway, is made up of solid and operable panels to let in as much or as little cross-breeze as they want. The study is at a juncture between the two sheds, next to the entry, and lifted up four feet to give it a “perch” feel, or as Rick likens it, his “command center”.
The exterior materials will be black corrugated iron on the living shed, and stained weatherboard on the sleeping shed. We’ll be aiming for simple, inexpensive finishes. The trusses in the living shed will be exposed timber. We’ve got to keep it simple to stay in their budget, and personally I think a better building will result from a careful, well-choreographed dance between the client’s budget and the architect’s aesthetic concerns. Blah blah, enough about architecture!
The adventure in Cheviot is flying forward. There is SO much more potentially going on beyond this house, but I can only hint at it now. Let’s just say we’re sowing seeds that might grow into some major projects.
Smog check: we’re returning to LA on July 31st. We absolutely can’t wait to get back, to jump right out of the middle of winter into the stinking hot summer. Friends of ours are getting married (wooohoo! we get to sit back and enjoy someone else’s wedding!!) Then we’ll be chilling in Newport Beach for a month—please come visit! We’ll host a big shin-dig or something. Then we’ll be popping back across the Pacific to finish what we started, working with an engineer and getting advice from a local architect to complete the plans and get it sent off to the building council.
And there’s always Ellis Emmett, the Kiwi bloke who got this whole Cheviot adventure started. (He’s the one who brought us on the rafting trip back in March, and thus introduced us to our first clients) The tree house is on hold because there’s a big wave headed his way. He’s off on another adventure, a real-estate adventure of sorts, beckoning for us to come along, only this time we’re not jumping off a 120-foot cliff with a rope tied around our waist. He might just be launching us to the moon… More about life on the farm next time, possibly including an episode in pig hunting!! It will probably our last ball of dirt.