Sustainable Eco Home Cockle Bay

The Architectural Brief & Affordability

Designed as a personal residence in Cockle Bay, this project serves as a live study in affordable, high-performance architecture on a small suburban site. The core objective was to deliver a highly functional, compact sanctuary that prioritizes thermal efficiency, spatial efficiency, and ecological health, proving that sustainable architecture can be achieved within an accessible framework.

Spatial Strategy & Material Honesty

The architecture borrows from the simple, unpretentious vernacular of the classic New Zealand 1950s bach. A singular, confident form is paired with a veranda that shelters the building envelope, providing vital summer shading and a sheltered outdoor room.

To keep the project financially accessible while ensuring architectural longevity, the layout relies on a strict modular logic and raw, honest materials left in their natural state: rough-sawn timber framing, exposed structural elements, and brick cladding both inside and out for thermal mass. The spatial experience relies on vertical volume rather than horizontal footprint, creating an expansive internal feeling within a highly disciplined budget. This also serves as a passive cooling mechanism to cool the house naturally.

Color, Recognition & Productive Landscape

The thoughtful integration of color and texture against this raw material palette was recognized with a Resene Color Award. The project was also featured extensively in the national publication Eco Home by Melinda Williams as a benchmark case study for residential energy efficiency.

The home utilizes a solar array and rainwater harvesting. Rather than working against the suburban context, the site has been completely transformed through an intentional, self-planted eco-system. Surrounded by productive fruit trees, organic vegetable gardens, and strategic native plantings, the landscape was designed to foster urban biodiversity, actively feeding the household while encouraging the return of native birdlife to the Cockle Bay canopy.

Winner of the Resene Total Colour Awards 2015  Residential Interior category

(featured in Homestyle April/May 2015)

(featured in ECO HOME book by Melinda Williams, 2018)

(featured in E-Architect, 2021).

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