in your tracks, and help you see anew”. In this he was inspired by Kazimir Malevich and his bold experiments in abstract painting. He eliminated elements that would make the cabins legible as regular buildings, such as flashings and normal-sized doors and windows, so that they appear monolithic. The sense of abstraction was enhanced by the selection of a fine board for the exteriors that was charred instead of stained, and the way the upper and lower edges of the structures were designed with the same pitch so “they weren’t houses with mono-pitched roofs, but complete prisms,” Cheshire says. Being small was an advantage. “Small houses offer the possibility of perfection in a way big houses rarely do – they approach the scale of furniture,” Cheshire says. (They also allow the chance to obsess over every detail. His office spent days, for example, investigating ways to lock the doors without the mechanisms being visible). The cabins’ size, in other words, was treated as an invitation to be brave. Cheshire and his clients liked the idea of using touches of luxury to enliven the interiors, to tease out what Cheshire calls “the tension between humble and special”. The cabin with the black interior is lined in form ply, cheap timber panels covered in a dark, polished coating for use in the concrete-casting process. Here, their sheen creates a deep sense of
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space, rendering the ceiling almost invisible. “At night if there’s just a couple of candles going, the panels have a sheen that’s quite disconcerting; it’s like you’re sitting in a void, or outside,” one of the owners says. The black cabin’s kitchen is a small brass insertion, a jewel-like touch of luxury in the darkness. In the other cabin's kitchen, the rich grain of oiled jarrah contrasts with the lightness of regular construction ply. Most coastal homes include as much glass as they can to allow their occupants to soak up the landscape. The cabins adopt an entirely different strategy, with each of their single square windows creating a trapezoid of light on the floor as the sun moves through the sky during the day. This makes the cabins a deeply interior experience, a feeling so resonant it makes you realise how uncommon it has become in contemporary New Zealand architecture. “There was a resistance to the idea of indoor-outdoor flow and all this real estate vernacular,” Cheshire says. “The cabins are a retreat from the landscape rather than a saturation in it.” There is a kind of poetry in this resistance, and in the determination to create something marvellous from something small. The quiet, contemplative power and self-assurance of these tiny structures can teach us all a lot: big lessons about needs, wants and having just enough.
Far left The other cabin's interior is clad in honey-coloured builder's ply. The floors in both cabins are made from unsanded, unsealed decking boards. Above left The ply cabin features a kitchen made of oiled jarrah. The stairs lead to the sleeping loft on the mezzanine floor. Right While most coastal holiday homes feature enormous glass doors, each of the cabins has a single square window carefully framing the view. An 'AJ' floor lamp by Arne Jacobsen sits beside the vintage Ercol sofa. The 'Diana' coffee table is by Konstantin Grcic for ClassiCon.