Musubi Property / Craig Steely Architecture
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Textual content description furnished 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 Significant Island of Hawaii. This solid-in-position concrete household is absolutely off the grid—powered by photovoltaic panels and catching all domestic and landscape drinking water from rainfall captured off the roof and stored in cisterns.
The internet site is composed of valleys with seasonal creeks and expansive fields of Wainaku grass. Panoramic sights abound, but because of to their exposure to higher winds and horizontal rain, the site is intricate to develop on. Its locale on the northeast side of the island is straight in the path of the incoming western trade winds. Its elevation creates a temperature dynamic that can quickly swap from the fantastic, cloudless blue sky without a trace of wind to enveloped with clouds to horizontal windblown rain in minutes. The wind blows up by means of the long valleys and fields earning the grass roll and swell like waves in the ocean.
The owners arrived to us with a very simple ask for: make a household that embraces the character of the windswept grasslands of the Hamakua coast. We responded with a dwelling that floats in this rolling sea of grass like a ship floats in the ocean. Like a ship’s prow, the sharpest close of this triangular home deflects the formidable wind.
The household gets its identify from its resemblance in approach to the Hawaiian version of the Japanese wrapped rice snack onigiri. On several situations, when viewing the drawings, a carpenter would remark how a great deal the strategy seemed like a musubi… so the name stuck. The diagram of the property is simple—an outdoor triangle within just an indoor triangle supporting a diamond-formed roof. The indoor triangle consists of three small curving concrete walls. These concrete curves designate the 3 zones of the dwelling: the bedroom/bathing zone, the kitchen zone, and the work/dwelling zone. The triangle-formed atrium in the heart gives an outdoor place concerning these zones with a floor of lower Pahoehoe lava. Doors on two sides of the atrium retract seamlessly into the partitions. A landscape of Hapu’u ferns and Rhapis palms generates a layer of veiled privacy to the outdoor shower and bedrooms of the atrium. This secured place is usable in windblown fog or dazzling sun—a legitimate extension of the inside area without having a roof.
The clients’ willingness to prioritize permeability more than privateness gave us the flexibility to create a system without having doorways or really hard boundaries. Spaces stream from zone to zone while normally remaining in visible get hold of with the rolling landscape. Grass flows correct up to the edge of the floor-to-ceiling glass walls. Hunting out the home windows on to the rolling grass landscape is like viewing waves on the open sea.
