The Modern Red Shed

As an architectural designer’s own home, this Otumoetai house is designed to reflect the family’s unique needs and wishes, with a material palette chosen for sensory effect and connections to the land.

For most people, but especially for those with neurodiversity, the tactile experience of a home can have a huge effect on their enjoyment of the spaces within. For Steven Chambers of Stufkens + Chambers Architects, who has two neurodiverse children, designing his own home offered a chance to bolster his family’s quality of life by using materials that are pleasant to experience with all the senses.

For the exterior, this meant cladding the home in corrugated COLORSTEEL®, chosen for the wave-like profile, which calls out to be touched as you walk alongside it, and extending this material over the roof gives the house a cohesive, contemporary look. The choice of Scoria for the cladding colour references the rural buildings that used to stand in this suburb, which was once a farm, and calls about the idea of rich soil, tying the building to the earth below it.

Inside, unfinished Lawson cypress timber lines the walls and floors in many of the spaces, chosen for its warm, spicy scent. A fireplace provides enticing glow and warmth, while also offering the sharp smell of split kindling and the atmospheric odour of gently burning wood. Most of the walls are white, with timber, artworks, plants and ornaments providing an engaging and bright interior colour palette.

The form of the house is in part due to its narrow, sloped site, which offered an opportunity to create a series of different levels. This enables spaces where the family can tuck themselves away when they need quiet time, with timber ceiling fins downstairs providing soft acoustics in the zones where they come together. Blue painted hallways then provide a visual cue to unwind between the public and private areas of the home. While the downstairs space is compact and open plan, with a kitchen bench running along one wall alongside the dining and living areas, the design provides many connections to the outdoors and places to perch and move.

A secondary dwelling, connected to the main home, includes a loft sleeping space accessed via a ladder, with a minty-fresh, green tiled bathroom tucked below. This unit can be used as an accommodation rental or as space for guests, with its whimsical design adding to the sense of relaxed fun that emanates from the home.

Outside, macrocarpa decking is designed to be long enough for scootering and running, with that COLORSTEEL® Scoria red cladding, evocative of the classic Kiwi shed, an ever-present backdrop.