The red box in the trees
Orua Bay sits between two headlands on the Manukau Harbour where the tide sets the schedule and the only access is across the beach. Pete Bossley and artist Miriam van Wezel have owned a bach here since 1997. Arruba is what they added after five years of thinking about what the site deserved.
The brief was simple: a one-room studio serving as bedroom, workroom and rumpus space, with a small bathroom in a concrete masonry tower. The red box floats above the boat space below, nestled among the branches of the existing pohutukawa, the landscape visible beneath the structure, the building weightless above it.
The red references the pohutukawa in summer flower, and the bright-painted baches that once lined this stretch of harbour. It is a colour with memory in it. Nu Wall aluminium cladding keeps it exactly as intended, vivid, precise, unchanged by the salt air and years.
