Tim Gittos and Caro Robertson of Spacecraft Architects have a way of making quite radical ideas sound like the most obvious thing in the world.
“We like pretending that up north is the tropics,” says Gittos of their new family house at Ngunguru, a sleepy coastal town 20 minutes outside Whangārei, where he grew up. They largely built it themselves, and while it has a footprint of 116 square metres, it only has about 70 square metres of interior space. Circulation is outside; so is the bathroom. “It’s a way of making a bigger house cheaper, and being outside experiencing things,” says Gittos. “Pretty simple really.”
In doing so, it performs a sleight of hand. The bits you need to be warm and weatherproof – living spaces, sleeping spaces – are inside. Everything else is technically outside. “It’s a bit of field architecture, really,” says Robertson. It’s a direct challenge to over-conditioned houses that are ever-more internal – houses where you go from car to carpet, without ever being outside. Increasingly, research is showing this has an effect on our sleep, our energy, even our mental health. “It’s a real human-nature conflict,” she says. “Comfort versus what you actually need. The house is an experiment, just for us, to see whether it’s true that we’re happy outside the machine.”
Gittos and Robertson have now built three houses for themselves over 10 or 12 years, and always on pieces of land they’ve bought or subdivided with friends. Each time, the design has set out to answer a specific question that they otherwise might not be able to convince clients to take on. The first, the Dog Box in Whanganui, was a collaboration between them and their friends Sally Ogle and Ben Mitchell-Anyon: four young architecture graduates giving up their day jobs to build a house on the cheapest piece of land they could find. The second – Top Shelf, their home in Miramar, Te Whanganui-a-Tara – is a small house at the top of a very steep slope on a two-house site that traps as much sun as possible in a city known for being cold and windy.
This one comes nearly a decade after the last, a period in which they have developed a reputation for incisive designs that solve multiple issues at once, using the simplest materials and the least amount of building to create the best possible conditions. In Wellington in particular, they’ve got very good at dealing with the wind, creating sheltered courtyards and enclosed gardens.
Relocating to Ngunguru was a chance to take some time out, they thought, to reconnect with family, and the landscape of sandy estuaries, pōhutukawa-fringed beaches and bush tracks. They bought a site with a friend and former colleague. It’s sloping, with established native trees to the north, and gentle views across the sleepy settlement, stretching down the coast. It also had an excavated platform previously used to park cars.
Their design took shape quickly: an in-situ concrete basement level to retain the hill, which raises the house up a storey to reach light, air and views. It’s square, with a big draping hip roof topped by a raised deck featuring a plumbed-in bath. The enclosed areas occupy one L of the square – a living-kitchen-dining space with a bedroom behind, and a bunkroom and bedroom-snug.
Everything else – including circulation, the bathroom, even a downstairs space that has become an office and second living room – is technically outside. It’s a huge area, which doesn’t require insulation or enclosure. “We’ve realised,” says Gittos, “that people are always bemoaning the energy-efficiency regulations, how restrictive they are and how expensive it is to build. But you can just change where the building envelope actually is.”
Gittos and Robertson moved north with their two boys in 2023, renting a small house nearby and enrolling Sam and Finn in the local primary school – where physical education modules in Year 8 extend to learning to dive at Tawhiti Rahi the Poor Knights Islands. They then set out to build the house, doing the concrete foundations and steel themselves before bringing on two builders to join them in completing the structural work. Spacecraft then completed the balustrades and cabinetry.
What makes these efforts all the more remarkable is that, during this time, they also won a competition through the New South Wales government to contribute to a pattern book for mid-rise housing. They completed their design from Ngunguru while building the house. “It was pretty amazing,” says Gittos. “We’d ride over in the morning, the kids would peel off to school and we’d get stuck in. It all kind of fell into place, really. It’s still kind of surreal.”
The finished house sits beautifully on the hill, beside an existing driveway that leads up to their friends’ place behind. You can see it from the coastal drive; a big draping roof with a regular grid of timber framing at 900-millimetre intervals. It’s a familiar form, but slightly abstracted. “Ever since uni,” says Gittos, “I’ve been interested in taking really normcore house shapes and messing around with them – the shapes themselves are good, it’s just they’re boring.” Usually, houses like this have tall sticks underneath them, and a big exposed deck out front. Here, the deck is pulled back under the roof, creating a kind of filter in both directions.
You come into the house from below, off the driveway. It feels solid; poured-concrete walls, with dappled light. Down here, the office and second living space is enclosed lightly by sliding aluminium-and-polycarbonate screens. Technically speaking, it’s a screened porch. As Gittos notes, “You just have to frame it for the council in a way they understand.”
A spiral staircase leads up to the deck: you arrive under cover, but outside, in a space that is unexpectedly, even headily, generous. There’s a building on two sides, clad in fibre-cement sheet. Sliding aluminium doors take you into the various spaces. There is a very large, square outdoor table that gets moved around the deck depending on the season. The view is mesmerising: down the coast to Whangārei Heads.
The spaces inside are just big enough. Bedrooms are at the back, looking into the bush. The living area is only lightly enclosed, the rhythm of the timber structure continuing inside, with the glazing sitting just outside it. There’s a simple kitchen, and a wood burner. Materials are straightforward and hard-working, but nicely detailed. In the bathroom, standard vinyl in pink and yellow creates a wet room. There’s Marmoleum flooring throughout the interior. Colours were chosen because they were available, and cheerful. It all feels – and I mean this in the kindest possible way – like a kind of casual shrug. Does it matter what colour the floor is when you have this much outdoor space to hang onto?
And the experiment, did it work? In short, yes. “It almost felt sneaky,” says Gittos. In summer, the doors stay open, and the boundary between inside and out blurs effortlessly. In the depths of winter – because even Northland gets a little cold – it’s more enclosed, with the wood burner on: a deliberately cosy existence in one smallish space. “When you’re sitting in the lounge, that verandah area feels like the same space, basically,” says Gittos. “I thought the feeling wouldn’t hold up in winter, but it does. The doors shut because the fire’s on – but there’s still that sense of space.”
The family lived in the house for a year, before school and work commitments drew them back to Wellington. One day, when the kids are at university, Gittos and Robertson will return full-time, to live between outside and inside, moving furniture around on the deck to follow the sun. “There’s a mindfulness to the house,” says Robertson. “The light is always doing wacky, sparkly things – coming through surprising places, landing on the ferns. We’ve had a lot of conversations about the moon and the stars. That’s not something you notice all that much in Wellington. But here, you really notice it because you’re outside all the time.”
