Location: Awaroa, New Zealand

Design Team: Patchwork Architecture

Area: 110 m²

Year: 2025

Image Credit: Courtesy of Patchwork Architecture

Design Features: Patchwork Architecture's House for Camping stands on the boundary of Abel Tasman National Park in New Zealand, close to the coast and surrounded by regenerating beech-podocarp forest and mature kānuka. Rather than clearing trees to secure a wider view, the house occupies an existing opening, treating the limited buildable ground as the starting point for preserving the forest.

The 110 m² house is organised around a courtyard, with rooms pushed toward the forest edge and gathered beneath one expansive roof. Its centre is not a conventional indoor living room but an open room exposed to sun, rain and planting. The low roof extends around the perimeter, while slender steel posts and timber volumes leave a continuous zone of sheltered circulation. The result feels less like an object in the bush than a campsite defined by its eaves.

This arrangement recasts how an extended family can gather. Kitchen, dining, living and sleeping rooms remain compact and visually connected across the courtyard. When more people arrive, the covered perimeter becomes additional sleeping territory, allowing tents to be pitched directly beneath the roof. Capacity comes from the combined use of courtyard, veranda and shelter rather than an increase in enclosed floor area.

Timber screens, sliding panels and operable edges further loosen the boundary between inside and outside. Sunlight passes through battens onto timber walls and deep red wet areas, while the forest reappears through doorways, corners and narrow passages. The apparent lightness is constructive: a broad metal roof rests on fine posts, and the timber rooms read as separate volumes set beneath it.

Solar power, rainwater collection and independent services allow the house to operate off-grid. Self-sufficiency is not an added technical layer but part of the same logic as the compact plan, preserved clearing and possibility of sleeping under the eaves. House for Camping does not turn nature into scenery; it asks its occupants to remain attentive to weather, light and forest, offering comfort through a closer relationship with those conditions.

Design Team: Patchwork Architecture was founded by architects Ben Mitchell-Anyon and Sally Ogle. They began working together in 2011, physically building their first project, DogBox, in Whanganui before establishing a Wellington studio the following year. That direct experience of materials and construction became central to the practice. Its current studio team includes Ben Mitchell-Anyon, Sally Ogle, Steph Roughan, Jason Tan, Olivia Ong, Catherine Hall and Natalie Bradburn.

The practice works across houses, multi-residential projects, commercial spaces and civic buildings, using inventive and economical responses to site and programme. Difficult ground, modest budgets and ordinary materials are often treated as productive design conditions, with details tested against practical building knowledge. House for Camping was designed by Patchwork Architecture, with Rory Wilson-Cartwright as project architect, structural engineering by Spencer Holmes and construction by Lovelock Carpentry and Building Ltd.