Each wing its own view
Mawhiti — Māori for ‘escape’ — refuses the single panoramic cliché. Stevens Lawson organised the Waiheke holiday house as three linked timber pavilions: one for living, two for sleeping. The wings fan across the site so each captures a distinct Gulf Island outlook rather than competing for the same horizon.
Breaking the house into pavilions also reduces bulk on a wind-exposed western coast. Sheltered outdoor pockets form between wings; each volume can orient to its best sun path. Holiday patterns — together by day, separate by night — are written into the plan.
“We aimed to craft a house for contemplation and retreat with a strong sense of its place in the world, a place of restoration.”
— Stevens Lawson Architects, project description
From pavilion to house
The residential work grew from an earlier sculptural pavilion, first imagined for the Venice Architecture Biennale and later built for Sculpture on the Gulf 2017. Angular geometry and timber language carried forward, giving the house a tested lineage rather than a separate stylistic start.
That sequence — public pavilion first, private house second — let architects and clients share a material and formal language before the larger investment. The brief asked for New Zealand character: Māori whare and rural barn silhouettes without pastiche.
Timber, concrete, salt air
Timber cladding and structure carry the South Pacific material story. Concrete floors provide mass and a cool underfoot plane in summer. Expansive glazing frames water and islands; asymmetrical roofs shed weather while echoing the pavilion’s sculptural silhouette.
Formally the house reads as vernacular at a distance — gabled, timber, grounded — and contemporary up close, unsettled by the pavilion’s asymmetric cuts. Links between pavilions choreograph arrival and create outdoor rooms that mediate wind and sun.
Sources
Research drawn from published project documentation. Photography credits are for attribution only — images on this page are placeholders until rights are cleared.
