By Solarei Architecture
River Drive House, Kerikeri, Far North, New Zealand
River Drive House is located on an open rural site facing due North over looking a river and rolling farmland. The floor plan layout prioritises living and bedrooms facing due North, and services areas to South. This achieves fully optimised passive solar, natural warmth, and an energy efficient design.
Insulated exposed concrete slabs capture and store radiant energy, as well as feature thermal mass walls.
The design maximises North views and sunlight, and opens to a large Southern olive orchard. Large roof overhangs protect corten steel cladding, and shade the house over summer. The house has 20,000L of rainwater storage for drinking, and uses an eco-cycle waste system for sewage.
Solarei Architecture was born out of a passion to deliver well designed, creatively focused, collaboratively based, budget conscious, environmentally responsive house designs to our clients.
What we design combines client aspirations with a creative environmental response, using clever design strategies to achieve this. Our objective is to creatively design homes which are based on environmental sustainable design principles, and the human experience.
Environmental sustainable design principles take into consideration a meaningful engagement with environment and climate. Design principles we use are based on smart orientation, passive solar, passive design strategies, natural warmth, passive cooling, cross ventilation, and stack effect. High performance building materials, energy efficiency, smart green technologies, and healthy building materials are some of the ingredients we use to achieve this.
By using this design approach, we are able to design a house which is naturally warm in winter, naturally cool in summer, gets the most of unique site features, and is always enjoyable to live in.
Fostering engaging relationships with clients, based on listening, honesty, and mutual exchanging of ideas has resulted in many successful award-winning projects, with national (NZ) and international recognition of our work.
Currently we are working on projects in Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand. Please get in touch if our work interests you.