The Moerewa Social Housing Initiative

What was Ngāti Hine’s vision for housing in Moerewa?

A key part of the vision was to provide long-lasting, safe, healthy homes, a community centre, and an outreach clinic for whānau.

Rowan:  “We started working on the concept with Ngāti Hine Health Trust in 2020. Ngāti Hine’s vision was to create a good environment that will inspire people to look after it and provide a valuable housing resource for the people of Northland that will last well into the future.”

What was the brief for this development?

Rowan: “Cato Bolam was engaged by Ngāti Hine as the lead land development consultant to provide architectural, planning, engineering and surveying services. The brief was to provide as many houses as possible, but they also made it clear that ‘We don’t want this to be like a high-density Auckland development.’

The housing ranges from single-storey three and four-bedroom to two-storey two-bedroom terrace homes. So, we had to strike a balance between designing something reasonably intense but responsive to the fact that we were working in a small town in Northland.”

“We feathered out the density by putting the terraces nearer the middle of the site and the single-storey standalone housing around the edges. This reduced the abrupt change between the existing low-density housing and the new medium-density homes.”

Ngāti Hine of a hundred hills.

Integral to the design process was the consultation and partnership with Ngāti Hine to ensure the architectural motifs and colours appropriately reflected Ngāti Hine’s cultural narratives and the surrounding landscape.

Rowan: “I sought Ngāti Hine’s advice about appropriate cultural motifs, patterns, or colours to inform the design and how the buildings would look. They put forward a whakatauki (a proverb) to be the focus for the design, ‘Ngāti Hine Pukepuke Rau,’ which means ‘Ngāti Hine of a hundred hills; each hill has its own chief.’ So, the hill formation became very important in the design, in which each house became a hill, and each person inside could be the chief of their domain. We worked to reflect this in the form of the buildings, materials and pallets, which were heavily influenced by the surrounding hills and the natural hues of the landscape colours.”

Navigating the site

The site posed some significant challenges, most notably flooding. Thanks to Cato Bolam’s integrated design approach, our team solved these challenges to benefit the overall design and delivery of the project.

Rowan: “Moerewa sits on a wide river valley, so the site design had to mitigate any potential surface flooding after heavy rainfall. Our engineers developed a detailed flood model using the site information from our surveyors. The design solution includes dry ponds, which will fill up in the event of heavy rain and then let the water soak away slowly. We worked with our engineers to optimise their location so they could provide landscaped green areas for the development as well as mitigate flooding. We have houses that face these green areas and look out over them, giving an open outlook instead of looking straight into the neighbours.

We also worked to maximise solar access by orienting the houses and their outdoor spaces to the North. This helps to ensure the homes will be warmer and dryer throughout the cooler seasons.”