A room with a view

This is the first view of the day’s light that we get from our bed each morning at Tūmai.  The view to the mouth of Te Hakapupu (Pleasant River) estuary is a place of great ecological drama, even on a rainy morning like today. The birds and New Zealand sealions flush around the corner of the sand spit on their way to or back from the sea. The tidal flows create, show, and then rub out their etchings in the sand.  Rafts of kelp come floating around from hundreds of km away where the waves wrenched it from their rocks, finally to be buried in our estuary sediments where they feed to microorganisms and local ecosystems.

The windows in this view from our bed are on the south side of our Tūmai house. They are set low to create a cosy (Danes would say “hygge”), enclosed and private feel to the bedrooms in particular.  We call our house Marahau, which translates from Māori as “wind garden” or “wind shelter”. The windows to the south do not open, a strategy for minimising heat loss. But this is not an “ecohouse” in the European passive house (“Passivhaus”) way – instead we believe in natural ventilation, and have wooden louvers inserted in slots to allow the outside sounds and smells in when weather conditions allow. It’s particularly lovely to hear the rhythm of the waves at night, or at dawn with a coffee and newspaper.

We are immensely grateful to our architects, Tim Heath and Hannah Sharp, from Architectural Ecology, for designing our wind shelter by the sea.