Great expectations

Ooh, you might need to click on the picture and see it close up to appreciate it! This is the preliminary plan for our house on Lot 31 North Boambee Road. I emphasise the word preliminary here because I am absolutely sure things will change a lot, but we had great fun this morning at Christian Fisher's practice, looking at drawings and playing around with ideas. I'm sure you realise it, but just in case, the image shows three views of the same property: the top view is an impression of what the construction will look like against the green of the hillside. The middle view is a floor-plan, and the bottom view is the front elevation.

The basic 'vision' for the property, as you can see, is for the various functions to be more or less separated out into different building units. So the central building houses the main living/kitchen/dining areas plus bedrooms for Ella and for us. Then there are two other buildings to contain guests, in one, and working spaces for Michael and me in the other. I guess that in an older building they would have been in separate 'wings'! Which makes it all sound very posh...

We have budget constraints and need to be clever in the use of materials to get a look and feel that we can afford without crippling ourselves financially. Christian's idea is to make the long sweep of walls at the rear of the buildings out of local Valla stone, partly to 'anchor' the building and to provide a heat sink on the northern elevation that will absorb warmth from the sun and radiate that back through the house in the winter months while shielding rooms from the brunt of the heat in summer. The south-facing rooms take full advantage of the ocean view and their southern walls are made of lighter materials, because here you don't need sturdy masonry to protect against the cold in the same way that you do in the UK. The exterior cladding of the building is likely to be something called zincalum which is a corrugated metal, interspersed with shiplap timber to give some variation. As the building is so long, it's likely that we'll run the corrugations vertically to reduce the perceived length of the buildings.

'Service areas' like the laundry and bathrooms will run along the rear of the building so that all rooms can make the most of the views, and areas will be separated by deck areas and courtyards. In this climate you want to maximise your opportunities to sit outside and enjoy the warmth and sunshine!

A roof sloping towards the rear of the property will provide lots of run-off rainwater which is important when you think that we will be wholly dependent on rainwater for all water useage: showers, baths, toilets, laundry and drinking water. No backup town supplies here! Which means no horrible chlorination, either.

We've built in lots of money-saving options too. Things like grey-water recycling (so that waste water from showers, for example, could be used to flush the toilet) cost something to put in but save money in the long-run, and solar heating and electricity mean we won't have electricity bills to pay after installation. But there are other things too: if we can't afford fancy windows we can put plain ones in (louvres are fashionable - and practical - here but cost more); we could build the pool later if we can't afford it up front, and we can cut other costs or defer things until a few years down the road. I imagine that although it will be very cost-effective to do garden landscaping at the same time as the house area is cleared we won't be able to do much more than put in a vegetable patch for quite some time... Luckily we won't need to buy any furniture (although we will need to buy appliances and all the stuff to fit-out bathrooms and kitchens... help).

So there you go: the plans for The Fernery, version #1.