Second Life

Shifting this shearing shed from agriculture to architecture became a race against time for Ben Daly who, with good, keen spirit, was getting stuck into the project so he and his wife, Dulia could move in before the birth of their first child. Suffice to say, Mother Nature played an ace when little Hattie arrived a month early. “That certainly threw out the schedule,” says Ben.

Travellers along the road to Leeston, half an hour south-west of Christchurch, could be forgiven for thinking Ben, an architect with a hands-on approach, had done nothing at all to make this utilitarian building habitable for a young family. It stands in a long grass paddock backed by a former grain silo and a stand of rumpty macrocarpa trees. There is a commitment to its calling. It looks like a shed: the whole shed and nothing but a shed. And that was exactly the intention.

Ben’s in-laws bought this farm in the 1930s but also with the outbuildings that had long captured Ben’s heart.