Bathroom Pavilion

Farmers’ Corner is a tourist focused retail and restaurant business that serves thousands of busloads of visitors to NZ every year. Located just outside of Ashburton, the business offers travellers the experience to interact with Alpaca and the adjacent lavender farm. With the existing bathrooms in need of refurbishment, the owners made the decision to create a new facility to house the bathroom services outside of the main building. Architype was commissioned to design a unique experience centred’ bathroom facility which would be up there with the best bathroom facilities in the South Island. Being located outside of the restaurant/retail building and having as its target audience travellers who had spent significant time onboard tour buses it was natural to create a building that connected visitors to the rural landscape in which the building was located. The bathroom pavilion is located on the entry axis of the main building in order to allow these one-time visitors to locate desperately need facilities immediately upon arrival. This axis continues right through the centre of the pavilion and leads the eye out into the surrounding landscape. To either side of the central axis, the pavilion is divided into private bathroom cubicles which look outward through full-height fritted glass to the fields beyond. Once visitors have finished their business they are led back to the central open-air breezeway where a 4m long doubled sided stone vanity is located for hand washing. The roof of the pavilion is constructed of an engineered timber lattice supporting a faceted glass roof. The roof is supported on a series of Oamaru stone fins which provide the divisions for the bathrooms cubicles and form the central open area.  Completion is expected in Nov 2018.