Musubi Home / Craig Steely Architecture
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Text description supplied by the architects. The Musubi Home is positioned on 100 acres of grassland and Ohia forest together the northeast slope of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. This cast-in-place concrete property is wholly off the grid—powered by photovoltaic panels and catching all domestic and landscape h2o from rainfall captured off the roof and stored in cisterns.
The web page is made up of valleys with seasonal creeks and expansive fields of Wainaku grass. Panoramic views abound, but because of to their publicity to significant winds and horizontal rain, the website is complicated to establish on. Its spot on the northeast facet of the island is instantly in the route of the incoming western trade winds. Its elevation produces a weather dynamic that can quickly change from the excellent, cloudless blue sky without a trace of wind to enveloped with clouds to horizontal windblown rain in just minutes. The wind blows up through the very long valleys and fields earning the grass roll and swell like waves in the ocean.
The house owners came to us with a uncomplicated request: make a household that embraces the nature of the windswept grasslands of the Hamakua coast. We responded with a house that floats in this rolling sea of grass like a ship floats in the ocean. Like a ship’s prow, the sharpest finish of this triangular home deflects the formidable wind.
The household receives its title from its resemblance in prepare to the Hawaiian version of the Japanese wrapped rice snack onigiri. On various occasions, when viewing the drawings, a carpenter would remark how a lot the strategy seemed like a musubi… so the title stuck. The diagram of the home is simple—an out of doors triangle within an indoor triangle supporting a diamond-formed roof. The indoor triangle is made up of a few brief curving concrete partitions. These concrete curves designate the three zones of the house: the bedroom/bathing zone, the kitchen zone, and the perform/living zone. The triangle-shaped atrium in the center provides an outside room concerning these zones with a flooring of slash Pahoehoe lava. Doors on two sides of the atrium retract seamlessly into the partitions. A landscape of Hapu’u ferns and Rhapis palms creates a layer of veiled privacy to the outside shower and bedrooms of the atrium. This guarded room is usable in windblown fog or vivid sun—a genuine extension of the inside area devoid of a roof.
The clients’ willingness to prioritize permeability in excess of privacy gave us the flexibility to generate a prepare without the need of doors or really hard boundaries. Spaces circulation from zone to zone even though generally remaining in visual make contact with with the rolling landscape. Grass flows right up to the edge of the flooring-to-ceiling glass walls. Searching out the home windows onto the rolling grass landscape is like looking at waves on the open up sea.
