Tongariro River House
From the client…
“The Turangi house makes me feel content and peaceful. I feel in tune with the seasons which we can see through the windows and hear in the rain on the roof.
When I go there, I just want to do the things that go with the season: pick blackberries and swim in the river in late summer, look for mushrooms and chestnuts in autumn, fish and ski in the winter months, river raft in the spring and so on.
Because it has just the necessaries, I feel content to live in a small dwelling, and I feel I don’t need any other luxuries. In fact, returning to our larger house in Auckland just makes me want to be back there again.
Client
Lois and David Pendergrast
Year
2001
Location
Turangi
type
Fishing Lodge
architect
Abri Architects
Type
Residential
An apparent sense of peace and contentment
The main thing that never fails to get me is walking into the kitchen and living room with its high ceiling and seeing the strong muscular trunks of the copper beech trees through the high windows, silhouetted against the sky.
We have sometimes wondered whether this double height room was too much. It’s a lot of space for the wood burner to heat, but it could not be any other way without losing that view that we love, up into the tops of the trees.
We had a friend who spent a week there in 2013 to write the final part of her PhD Thesis. She said that her supervisor had asked if there had been something different about where she was when she wrote that final section. An apparent sense of peace and contentment had found its way into her written words.”
