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Great Barrier Island, New Zealand
Fearon Hay Architects
On a rugged island in New Zealand, Fearon Hay crafts Shark Alley House, designed to peel back its skin to let the landscape flow through
By Sarah Amelar
To make the journey to Shark Alley House, you travel by boat or light aircraft some 56 miles northeast of Auckland to Great Barrier Island (also known as Aotea), New Zealand. Then, after a spin on the island’s serpentine main road, you need tides low enough to let your four-wheel-drive vehicle continue over sand dunes and splash right across an estuary. With only 900 permanent residents and no electrical grid or public water-supply system, this mountainous, 110-square-mile landmass remains mostly rugged and untamed. Its dense bush, rare fauna and flora, and spectacular white sand beaches are “still quite undiscovered even by New Zealanders,” according to Jeff Fearon of Auckland-based Fearon Hay Architects, designers of Shark Alley House. Even the house’s owners, he adds, found their 30-acre site on an isolated cove “a bit by mistake.”
The house itself, quite modestly scaled, defers to the magnificent setting, but discreetly holds its own. Comfortably grounded, it gestures expressively with one end, containing the master bedroom, cantilevered off the land. When the house’s glass exterior walls all slide away behind aluminum storm shutters on tracks—leaving little more that the building’s fine bones—the place comes into sharp focus as an open pavilion. With its skin peeled back, the entire L-shaped interior turns into a breezy veranda, merging indoors with out. Just as the architects intended, the inside spaces—a modest program of two bedrooms, a fluid living/dining/kitchen area, a courtyard, and for the owners’ grown children, two bunk rooms—become viewing stations oriented toward the panorama of sea and sky, with distant land formations silhouetted on the horizon. Freed of its glass enclosure, the cantilevered master bedroom, a corner perch, turns into an open-air sleeping porch. Similarly, the dining area gets its own entirely open corner. When nearly wall-free, the architecture invites you to cast off most of your own garments and pad around barefoot in a bathing suit.
Want the full story? Read the entire article in our April 2005 issue.
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