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The bach, which is rented as a vacation home when not being used by its owners, gives a range of spaces to escape to within its walls. The end of the house farthest from the road contains the secluded master bedroom with en suite, which has its own entrance and is separated by the covered deck. Each bedroom has a sheltered outdoor space with a translucent screen that acts as a kind of lightwell, offering total privacy while allowing light to permeate the interior. The height of the screens was lowered slightly to give a clear view of the silhouette of the nearby mountain. “You don’t want to be opening and closing curtains all the time,” says Lance Herbst. “We wanted it to be the kind of house you can walk around in after your swim and have a high level of privacy.”

Fed up with flashy, environmentally insensitive beach homes, architect Gerald Parsonson and his wife, Kate, designed a humble hideaway nestled behind sand dunes along the New Zealand coastline. Crafted in the image of a modest Kiwi bach, their 1,670-square-foot retreat consists of a group of small buildings clad in black-stained pine weatherboards and fiber-cement sheets.

Achieving such efficiency and maintaining the integrity of the wetlands and woodlands on the property meant more research for both the designers and the resident—just getting approval for the siting of the buildings and the driveway took eight months—but Hague is hardly one to do things half way. “A lot of times couples engage in house-building, like birds. I'm doing this solo, more like a monk,” he says of the deeply personal undertaking.