Bivvy House Lake Wakatipu, New Zealand Architect: Vaughn Mcquarrie Architects
hen I first met the clients, they were heading off for a 12-day hike,” says architect, Vaughn Mcquarrie. “They gave me a simple and elegant brief : ‘a space to eat, a space to sleep, a space to wash, a space to play, a space to read and to share with friends.’ It needed to ‘contain and balance the elements’ and to ‘sing with the music of the wind and rain’. They didn’t want a conventional house. They were after something different.”
With this dream brief, Vaughn drew on his intimate knowledge of the area, a place of his own childhood memories. “I was always fascinated by the gold miner’s huts: the stacked stone walls; the sheets of iron for shelter. These beautiful little ruins dotted all around the area.” In a nearby valley, Sam Summers’ historic hut offered particular inspiration for this project. With its humble but strong form, it implies the basics of shelter and how to live in a mountain environment.
While Sam’s hut is on the forest floor, the site for this house overlooks Lake Wakatipu near Queenstown – on a platform created by a large cut in the side of the valley wall. “It wouldn’t have been my approach to create a house site,” says Vaughn. “So we began to imagine how we could somehow repair or reinstate part of the site by referencing the original contour. This led to how the house might have been formed around large rock fragments left during the platform excavation. A rock bivvy perhaps.”
The resulting shape is anchored to the slope, winter sun path, and survey data of surrounding peaks. The asterisk in plan, and the triangle in section, set the house boundaries and angles. When you view it from the side, it recreates the same steep slope as the valley wall and visually joins the hill back together; walls point towards landmarks making the vertical and horizontal planes collide at abstract angles.
Sensitive use of materials internally creates very different moods according to the use of the room. Vaughn has assigned three areas as