A forever home with a purpose: Suburban off-grid living in Cambridge

Tawa Architecture Off-Grid Home Cambridge — Moore Street Project Cambridge, Waikato: Off-grid, featuring Formance SIPs high-performance construction. Architecture, interiors and energy-modelling by Tawa Architecture, Cambridge.

What if going off-grid didn't mean compromising on architecture, comfort or luxury?

Set in suburban Cambridge, this fully off-grid home built around an exceptionally high-performance envelope - achieving a blower door result of 0.45 ACH. No connection to the street power supply. No compromise on lifestyle.

Warm. Quiet. Resilient. Energy efficient. And designed for living well - including a spa, sauna, and the everyday comforts you'd expect from a refined architectural home.

It's a different way of thinking about what a New Zealand home can be.

For the homeowners, the brief was never really about the technical performance - it was about capturing a feeling and trusting the team to translate it into a building.

"We didn't know what our forever home was going to look like - for him [Brooke} to take the ideas, the feelings that we expressed, and then convey them on paper in a building form that delivered everything that we had ever hoped for."

That brief was rooted in how they'd always lived. In their first home together in Christchurch- a two-person flat - people would come, and stay.

"I used to row, and on a Sunday in winter, all the crew would end up at our place and probably still be there at dinner time. That whole just being with people was really important to us. And this house does that. It delivers that. People come and they want to spend time with us - and you can't value that."

Independence, by design

Going off-grid wasn't a compromise to be managed. It was a deliberate choice, made with retirement in mind.

"One of the features of this house is electrically, it's off-grid as well, so we're self-sufficient for energy - and we had to think about what life would look like after we retire. We can minimise our costs, so that we can have more say over what we do with our retirement."

That self-sufficiency runs through the whole build - the 0.45 ACH blower door result, the airtight, thermally-bridge-free envelope, the solar array doing the work a street connection would normally do - engineered so the home performs entirely on its own terms, without asking anything of the occupants.

A different feeling, walking in

Ask the homeowners what it's actually like to live there, and the language shifts from performance to something more instinctive.

"To come home to this house is just incredible. You walk in the door, and you walk from whatever it's like outside to inside, and it's just different. It's like a hug…The house gives you a hug when you walk in. It's just lovely. And the atmosphere is just amazing."

Built by the right team

That atmosphere, they're clear, comes down to who was in the room.

"I think that's part of having a really good team - with Brooke and Amie, and a really great team with Higgs as well. The combination of Higgs and Tawa and the personalities - all of their personalities made this house what it is. Having Tawa on board, Brooke and Amie, was absolutely the right decision for us."