A Home Like A Holiday
On a quiet corner in the sleepy, seaside settlement of Waikuku Beach is a home that feels like a holiday.
words: Amelia Norman
images: Christopher Collie, Max Warren
Waves lap and gulls call in the middle distance. Quail skitter across the tidy, sheltered lawn. Sun pours over the neat deck, through wraparound sliding doors, across smooth West Coast beech floors. But despite the epic bach vibes, this is the full-time family home of Max and Julia Warren and their young daughters Olive and Poppy.
“We live in Waikuku Beach for the lifestyle,” explains Julia. “Our lives are very outdoorsy and very beach-focussed and we wanted our home to blend in with this environment and our lifestyle.”
From the street, the Warrens’ home is all striking angles and gently weathered larch cladding. Eye-catching yet modest. The bold Corten steel alcove around the front door gives just a hint of the savvy design within.
The couple designed the home themselves. Max, an architect, who has recently set up his own business MW Architect, had long held a dream of designing his own home. With an array of award-winning projects from which to draw inspiration and a wish-list that included optimised outdoor living space and an “amazing” kitchen for food manufacturer, Julia, the pair threw numerous ideas around before settling on their compact, threebedroom, bach-like design.
“We’d been looking for land for a while, whilst living in Christchurch,” explains Julia. “We found this property in 2018. What we actually bought was an enormous macrocarpa hedge and a very old, dilapidated bach that had been here forever. Max took out everything that he could potentially reuse, like some lovely rimu and flooring, then he tied the framing to his Dad’s Landcruiser and pulled the whole shack down!.”
Once the property was cleared, the couple were standing on a 688m2 pile of sand. “It was all just sand,” recalls Julia. “It made digging the piles really easy, but it also meant we had to bring in a huge amount of soil to get anything to grow here.” It also inspired the home’s moniker: Sandhill House.
The only nod you’ll now find to the oodles of sand are an outdoor shower secreted around the side of the house (“ideal when we’re coming in from the surf”) and an impressive succulent garden where enormous green, yellow and blue agave and cacti variants thrive.
Around the garden’s edge, lush akeake, lancewoods and lemonwoods create a well-established border. To the south are a walnut tree, apricot, loquat and feijoas. Just off the deck, to the north, is a small, flourishing herb garden along with some greens and strawberries. “That’s my kitchen garden,” says Julia, an avid foodie who operates her own raw food business, Make it Raw. “
A functional kitchen was a non-negotiable for me in the design phase. I wanted an amazing kitchen with lots of storage space and a walk-in pantry where our appliances could sit, ready to go. Max’s only requirement was space for a coffee machine.”
All the kitchen boxes have been well and truly ticked with a single wall of black cabinetry, steel benchtops and brass hardware offset beautifully by the ply walls that envelop the kitchen and living space. Max’s coffee machine, shining in the corner, is the only benchtop appliance to be seen. The leathered negresco island is a central feature, serving as a family meeting space as much as a food prep one. “The island really brings the family together. The girls will sit and draw or eat there while we’re in the kitchen.”
Across the island is the bright living space, with those holiday-feel wraparound sliding doors and the gabled ceiling filling the room with beautiful natural light. A wall of ply nooks provides storage and work space; its practical functionality contrasting with the colourful climbing wall that dots its way up to a safety net and a sun-yellow hatch into the upstairs loft space. Up here, Julia and Max share the space for sewing and working, respectively.
“I love the way Max has incorporated a lot of fun things,” says Julia. “The girls go up the climbing wall and into the net and read books up there. Then there are the colourful nail plates up on the exposed trusses, the bright yellow laundry and the yellow garage floor.”
These happy pops of unexpected colour amongst the ply walls, timber floors and sleek furniture have earned the home two Resene Colour Awards this year. Sandhill House has also received a Housing Award at the 2023 New Zealand Institute of Architects Canterbury Architecture Awards.
“These awards are a nice way for Max and our builders to get some recognition for the hard work they put into the house,” says Julia. “But it also shows that you don’t have to be building a million-dollar home to engage an architect; it shows that an architect can actually save you money with clever design and good use of space whilst adding something fun with a little bit of quirkiness.”
