A compass in a paddock pointing north

But when architect John Irving presented his sketch to the owners of this rural property near Mangawhai, north east of Auckland, they didn’t ask. The point was obvious and so was the point. The homonymic reasons were immediately clear from the scale model: the home settled into the typography of a headland like a hand in a glove. “We didn’t design the form to be clever or even overly sculptural. It was a response to the site,” says Irving. And with