Parbhu Barn House

The Waikato rolling countryside is replete with barns and implement sheds with a mix of board and batten cladding and corrugated steel. On summer evenings, headlights and floodlights can often be seen, piercing through from the inside of barns as farmers and contractors work late to bring in hay before the dew (or rain) of the morning. So when Chow:Hill was asked to develop a project brief for a distinctive but small and functional premises that included accommodation and implement shed, this harvesting image caught our imagination.

House or barn? It’s a barn house! Serving as a temporary home for the smallholding owners until their ‘feature home’ is built, the workshop with simple living quarters on the upper level and an implements shed on the ground floor, received national recognition for its well-proportioned and modern agrarian design.

LVL portal frames form the primary structure and corrugated coil-coated steel cladding provides solidity of form. The horizontal timber battens combined with hit and miss cedar sliding screens over the main windows allow for the provision of filtered light to the interior spaces. The concealed gutters provide a clean edge to the building, whilst the recessed glazed gable ends bring a contemporary response in addressing the foreground ponds and pasture, and background vista of the Hakarimata ranges. The interior linings consist of blonded plywood ceiling and walls, and the LVL portals are exposed and similarly finished.

At night the barn glows, dramatically revealing the large glazed openings behind the battens and screens within the traditional barn form.