Neatly Robust Retreat – Concealed Refuge by Oli Booth Architecture
As an interplay between light and shadow, a textural rippling façade creates a robust and protective veil for the slight interior of the efficiently planned Concealed Refuge. Designers and husband-and-wife team Oli Booth and Libby Elmore channel ideas of retreat and seclusion to sculpt their highly detailed haven.
Perched looking out from its elevated position, the building feels removed and transportive, despite being embedded amongst other homes in the Auckland suburb of Grey Lynn. In designing the slight and modest two-bedroom urban home, both Oli and Libby wanted to ensure a sense of removal from the busy world outside, creating a place of recharge. While inner-city living has its multitude of benefits, there exists an undeniably compromising closeness between residences, where feeling separated is not always a given. By creating a protective shell of sorts, Concealed Refuge feels both removed and private, balanced by views outward that connect to nature. Both occupants feel that, in a way, “we’re living in an experiment,” says Oli. “While our thoughts and ideas could be realised in their entirety,” he adds, “we felt the design was one aspect, but how the home reacts to and celebrates its immediate context is the true test.”
The small 85-square-metre home sits on an equally modest site of 280 square metres. The clever manipulation of the building form engages with natural light throughout the day while maintaining privacy, creating interesting moments that feel sculptural. “We used the house as a chance to really push boundaries and try out detailing and materiality that we may not otherwise have had the chance to try,” Oli says. “We made the decision early on to keep the footprint small and the quality high to try to emphasise how smaller spaces can feel equally as generous as their larger selves.” While it really is the ideal scenario for the designer to also be their own client, the same challenges need to be viewed through an opportunistic lens. Oli adds that “the house was a wonderful test for us to express our personalities and creativity in ways that you might not otherwise get with a regular client-architect relationship.”
Anchoring the home to its site, the use of fluted concrete formwork creates a sense of permanence. As a new insertion to an existing milieu, the structure sits pushed toward the boundary, creating a courtyard garden in the centre of the site. “This engagement with the courtyard is unlike typical interactions of surrounding villas and bungalows where the houses are normally located centrally on the site,” Oli describes. “This arrangement can limit how a home engages successfully with its surroundings, as landscaped areas can become secondary – we wanted the environment to become something that was folded into the home but celebrated in different ways through the spaces we created.” The outdoor space is an important extension of the home and its functions, with operable doors connecting to what feels like its own outdoor room.
The intuitive floor plan is formed from a place of restraint and efficiency. Although spread over two levels, the burrowing of the lower level into the sloping site allows a reduced presence on approach, accentuating the architecture being a respectful response to place and context. “Cutting into the land allowed the house to be hunkered down into its surroundings,” Oli says. “It provides a lovely engagement with the site, whereby the bedrooms are restful, set within the bush and feel completely removed from its urban environment, reinforced again by the lower level being concealed by the native vegetation downslope of the house.” Framing the upper level, the fluted concrete walls sit to the north and east, pulling the overall form together and recalibrating an inward focus.
Light, shadow and materials have a symbiotic relationship here. The robust external form opens up from within, with glazing providing a connection to the wider streetscape and surrounding natural elements. “Light and shadow inform an ever-changing palette,” Oli says. “Exposed concrete forms a thermal moderator, black floors and ceilings compress and absorb light, Totara timber wall linings provide warmth and a consistency for the vertical elements in the room, while the stone bench is raised on a plinth to create an anchor to the space – designed more [as] a piece of furniture, rather than a typical island.” The integration of dark ceilings and floors deliberately channel views outward, removing distractions internally and creating a cocoon-like enclosure from within, amplifying and playing with the effects of light. An emphasis on balance brings the fineness of timber linings to articulate scale and add texture, together with the rough and undulating honesty of the concrete and the lightness of the glazing.
Navigating the challenges of such a constricted site, materiality and operable elements ensures a grander sense of volume and proportion. “We wanted to make a small space feel expansive,” Oli says, “so the decision to only reveal vertical elements helped to achieve this goal. Unusually, the house faces away from the sun, so it provides a special opportunity to establish moments to bring it back in.” In reacting to the less obvious connection to light, the response also needed to be unconventional in its own way. “Exploring how light can be amplified, a 4.2-metre long ‘slot’ was inserted at the apex of the roof. Together with the ceiling space flaring out, this encouraged the sunlight to be directed deeper into the living spaces.”
The ability to look beyond the conservative and the expected – assisted greatly by being both the client and designer – has sculpted a unique and slight home that responds to its location and surrounds in a unique way. Concealed Refuge stands as its own iteration of an inner-urban home, disseminating the idea that living amongst others need not compromise on feeling reclusive and calm.
