Can a dream home be a green home?

November 2012

"The first time I stood on our piece of land I got the weird feeling I’d been there before. I looked down to the leafy Ohinetahi Valley, then up to the hills above, and something about it just felt right. Suddenly two kereru flew overhead – I was sold! Now I just had to convince my wife Helen our search was over.

Luckily, Helen fell in love with the land too – with the surrounding trees, the seasons reflected in the valley below, and the peaks above us like watchful faces.

It was the land that made us want to build. We’d really been looking for a house, but once we decided to buy land we were faced with a double challenge: to create a house that fitted this beautiful setting, and do it at a price we could afford.

Neither of us had even owned a house before, so the prospect of building one was scary, but we also found it came with some mouth-watering opportunities. We both had a gnawing sense that there must be a better way for us to live on this earth. Plenty of people are better informed and more committed to this idea than us. Yet we wanted to be conscious of our environment – to design a house that reminds us of our place in the environment and our ongoing impact…

We would also be building in the shadow of the Christchurch earthquakes. One thing the earthquakes have taught us is the value of understanding the land we’re building on – the actual, local, detailed environment. We now know that brick and stone on swamp and creek doesn’t work. Similarly, when we came to look at ‘eco house’ options – and there are a number of pre-designed, kit-set versions currently on the market – we found them all built for a generic New Zealand environment.

What we wanted, if funds would allow, was a house as sensitive to the local environment as possible – the slope of our field, the views around us. Inevitably this meant one thing: engaging the services of an architect.

Helen found us someone who suited our project to a tee: Justin Leadbetter, from Leadbetter Carr. We directed all our hopes, ideas and problems at Justin and together we came up with the following plan:

• Build a single-storey, small modern cottage, clad in macrocarpa board and batten, in an L-shape around an existing Lombardy poplar.
• Use wooden pile foundations (not concrete slab), to sit ‘lightly on the land’. Wooden piles also allow any ‘under-runners’ (water-tracks under the soil surface, quite common in hilly sites) to drain away more easily.
• Earthquakes are still an issue, so use timber frame, timber cladding, and light iron roof.
• Limit excavation. Slips and erosion around houses in the area (Banks Peninsula) are often associated with over-excavating and covering with hard surfaces. The house, therefore, to have a gravelled driveway, as short as possible. All displaced soils to be kept and redistributed onsite.
• Keep it small. Bigger houses are not only more expensive and use more resources to construct, they also need more energy to heat. We need a family home (our son, Arlo, was born in July, and we have hopes for more) but have kept the floor space to 135m²: well below the current average new house size in New Zealand of 200m².
• Conserve resources. Services were not at the boundary so we took the option of treating sewage onsite, recycling greywater for irrigation, and harvesting rainwater for drinking.
• Recycled materials. All whiteware was salvaged – brand new, unused! – from an apartment block demolished after the earthquakes. Likewise the reclaimed wooden flooring from a destroyed warehouse, and old tiles gathered from various second-hand stores.

So, we now have a design that suits us – and, we think, the land. But can we find a builder to fit our budget? Can our house become a physical reality, or will it remain just a beautiful dream?"