Simple Pleasures – Ao Marama Retreat by Common Space

Removed and impassive, Ao Marama Retreat allows for immersion within an uninterrupted landscape, carving itself as a reflective and nurturing sanctuary. Common Space draws on an unfinished and robust palette to provide shelter and fulfil basic needs, allowing the views over the landscape towards the far-distant city to be the focus.

Reflecting an unconventional method of property ownership, Ao Marama Retreat is co-owned by a farming partnership that uses the retreat as a place of repose while still being connected to their main farm and its operations nearby. The formal approach takes inspiration from its surrounds and a familiar rural vernacular, bringing sheeted steel and encasing the restrained and regular forms in elemental protection from the elements. As an extension of Common Space’s ethos, the honest and raw expression of form and materiality ensures the retreat is connected foremost to its site, as a response to the contextual influences and a place to be reminded of the simple pleasures of life.

Pop-out window seats plant visitors within the fields they overlook, while the outdoor covered baths ensure a ‘douche with a view’, with an outlook that stretches to the nearby city and its glimmering lights.

Ao Marama Retreat is built by Atrium Homes, and its gestural engagements with the natural surrounds allow a feeling of immersion, while still being protectively. Openings are scaled to immerse the interior in the view, and pop-out window seats plant visitors within the fields they overlook. This approach is carried through outdoors, where the outdoor covered baths offer a place to bathe with a view, their outlooks stretching to the nearby city and its glimmering lights.

In its remoteness, integrated sustainable principles allow the operational and support elements to run effortlessly, and through optimised orientation and operable façade elements, the building is able to breathe and capture wanted solar gains. The inbuilt modularity of the design ensures minimum wastage. Standard steel sheet sizes dictate the scale and layout of the structure. The internal and exterior FSC certified plywood sheet linings also follow similar principles. The timber from the native Puriri tree on site was sourced by collecting only elements that had fallen naturally, which was then milled locally. From a cost and efficiency perspective and also from an environmental awareness, the project exemplifies a conscious approach to design and construction.

Both from a cost and efficiency perspective, but also from an environmental awareness, the design inspired by its own consciousness.

In its wrapping warmth, Ao Marama Retreat’s use of a hardy and robust materiality ensures its continued endurance. Common Space crafts an immersive experience of place with the utmost simplicity.