Leith Macfarlane was in her third year at the University of Auckland’s architecture school in 2021 when her class pitched ideas for the Summerhill Community Base.

It was a design studio assignment with real clients: a working farm, and the Summerhill Charitable Trust, which would fund, approve and utilise the chosen concept. Gabrielle Walton, a trustee whose parents gifted the land in Pāpāmoa to the public in 2012, says the initiative started almost by accident. The trust had approached the architecture school for help sheltering groups of students when they visited on school trips.

A class taking refuge from the rain in an old woolshed sparked the idea for the base itself. About 20 student designs were presented. Macfarlane’s was chosen. “It fitted within the scale of the existing woolshed, it fitted into our environment, it opened really easily in all directions to the public – and, of course, it used all of our timbers,” says Walton, whose family runs Summerhill Timbers.

What followed for Macfarlane was less a commission than a slow, unlikely apprenticeship. Course tutor and professional teaching fellow Matt Liggins remained involved from design through to construction, offering invaluable guidance and unwavering energy over Macfarlane’s fourth and fifth years of study, and into practice.

“At any stage of the process, it could have fallen over,” she says of the project, which depended on grants to cover nearly two-thirds of its cost. It stopped feeling theoretical and started feeling real with the demolition of an old lean-to — and later, an opening night, with the whole building full of people. She still visits on the way south. “It’s pretty amazing that someone — not me alone, but collaboratively — designed something that all these people invested their time and money into.”

Early on, Macfarlane set herself four principles that helped to shape the building and keep the design honest to the site: retain, educate, flex, warmth. The old woolshed, built 60 years ago by Walton’s father, gave the new one its width and roof pitch. He lived to see it finished (he died earlier this year, aged 95) and, Walton says, “really grew to love it”.

The rudimentary exposed framing of the original shed is reinterpreted as a legible post-and-beam structure in the new one. Cross-braced timber cassettes between the posts are stuffed with wool that remains visible in the finished building. “It is quite experimental,” Macfarlane says. “I haven’t seen it done before, so everyone was trying to figure out how to make it work.” Beyond insulation, the wool does something nobody quite predicted: in a building built almost entirely from timber, it keeps the interior from feeling dark. “It just lifts everything up inside.”

That timber — cypress for structure and cladding, Victorian ash on the walls, blackwood as a darker accent in the kitchen joinery — was all grown and milled by Summerhill Timbers. The old shearing stand reappears in Macfarlane’s design as a tuck shop with pop-out windows. Red corrugate, another woolshed signature, lines the bathrooms.

Since opening in May last year, the building has hosted about 9000 people — school groups and kindergartens, iwi gatherings, drumming circles, elder-care outings, volunteer restoration days. Macfarlane says the base offers a new blueprint for how community-based spaces can be designed and developed, “and what can be achieved where there is an unwavering commitment to core values – along with a giant leap of faith by all those involved.”

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