Floating House

RESIDENTIAL

• PROJECT

  Floating House

• LOCATION

  Parnell, Auckland

• STATUS

  Preliminary Design

This project enthusiastically revels in a structural gymnastics!

It recycles an old warehouse by retrofitting the existing building and providing a new bedroom ‘floating’ above. The space between old and new becomes vegetable gardens and terraces for occupants above and below to share.

Within the warehouse are office spaces, garaging and storage rooms. Above them are the living areas, large terrace, and three bedrooms which sit amongst the existing steel roof portals that have been left to express the previous life of the building.

Floating above them again, the main bedroom and subsidiary rooms cantilever from the stair core, providing shelter to the terraces and gardens below, and developing the site up to the maximum allowable height. Because the site is in the bottom of a valley in a narrow road, lifting the building as high as possible provides relief from the otherwise internalised nature of the site.

The upper level structure cantilevers from the stair core, propped on one column in the north-west, with in-wall trusses which are held in tension by a stainless steel cable in the south-east corner. Structural design was in conjunction with Gary James of Brown and Thompson.