Blade Runner

- Catherine Woulfe

Crunch around a corner in a long, ordinary gravel drive and there, abruptly, is an extraordinary house.

It has heard you coming. It’s crouching behind a black wall made blacker by the shadows of ponga and kanuka.

Architect Tim Dorrington gets a kick out of that first impression: the wrap of the grooved fibre-cement cladding, the way it dives into the ground at one end, the single, simple plane of the roof.

Coming in? Through that chink in the wall and turn left. The black cladding ducks inside, too, running down a short, wide hallway and hiding a series of doors: storage, two bedrooms. Its no-nonsense, mid-century march is picked up overhead, with black-laminated beams spaced at two-metre intervals throughout.

Black, you register. Sunlight. Then: biscuit-toned ceiling. It’s Strandboard, a bit unusual but cheap. Dorrington has been using it this way since he saw Chilean architect Mathias Klotz do so about 10 years ago. “I quite like using products in ways that maybe they’re not supposed to be used,” says Dorrington. “It’s normally one of the ugly ducklings in the material palette, but we’re celebrating it.”