| 113 T T Virginia Wright Following in family footsteps The Whakamaru Bay house was designed to keep the holiday home or camping feeling while meeting passive Haus standards in a way that hadn’t been done before. HRC Construction BUILDING Given that Harry Church’s father is an architect, and his grandfather a builder it’s not surprising that Harry also chose to go into construction. It’s also partly thanks to his father that he set up his own business, HRC Construction, three years ago, even though he’d only completed his apprenticeship a year earlier. Harry took a job helping the builder already engaged to build his father’s house. When that became an opportunity to take over the whole build shortly after the foundations were down Harry felt confident he could do the job. “Building the house that Dad designed was a bit of a leap but it was a really good project. It was an architectural build so a bit of a step up. It was more complicated than a standard house build and I had a lot to learn both on the building side of things but also going out on my own a bit earlier than most people generally do,” says Harry who is now 25. It was a steep learning curve which Harry managed with consultation, communication, and hard work. He’s only recently hired a qualified builder, who’s now his on-site foreman, which has freed him up to spend time running the business as well as working on his current projects. Before then it was just Harry with Hohua Aramoana (22yrs), an apprentice he took on two and a half years ago while still building his father’s house, and who has just won an award at the Apprentice of the Year Awards. “ I was needing an extra set of hands on-site and I couldn’t afford to employ a qualified builder so I went the training route instead,” explains Harry. The Whakamaru Bay house was designed to keep the holiday home or camping feeling while meeting passive Haus standards in a way that hadn’t been done before. The innovative build made use of some materials in unconventional ways such as the light emitting corrugate used as an exterior shell, more commonly used for roofing, which encloses the barn-shaped house in a sort of second skin which is itself lined. “It’s like a rectangular farm shed but with an insulated shell which was part of building the house to passive Haus standards. Then big aeroplane hangar doors, which are glass anyway, open to reveal the internal structure which is Abodo with a natural finish. It’s not a standard shaped house so there was a lot of project management and problem solving on site working with the sub-contractors,” explains Harry. Having done his apprenticeship in Christchurch meant that Harry didn’t have the strong relationships with sub-contractors in the broader Rotorua area that he does today. “Everybody was fresh to me so I had to work super-closely with everyone but most of them are now part of my core team that I use for every job.” Challenging or not the combination of his father Darryl’s design, his mother Lee-Ann’s interior design and the ongoing consultation with his brother and sister has resulted in a four-bedroom family holiday home, complete with a mezzanine floor sleeping up to 10 people, where they all regularly catch up over weekends. A year on it’s just won a Regional Architectural Award, and been shortlisted for a World Architecture Festival award, but well before that Harry had been approached to finish a nearby build in strife as well as another bespoke architectural build for one of his father’s colleagues in DCA Architects. Clearly the standard of HRC Construction’s work speaks for itself. “It’s like a rectangular farm shed but with an insulated shell which was part of building the house to passive Haus standards.” 0210 680 600 HARRY@HRCCONSTRUCTION.CO.NZ Contact Wade - 0272288225 | admin@manghamcivil.co.nz Our Services Include: Commercial & Residential Drainage | Retaining Walls Excavator & Truck Hire | House Site prep | Waste removal Subdivisions | Rotorua Lakes council approved contractor Certified drainlayers with over 30 years of experience
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDc2Mzg=