When Paererewā first approached ahha about designing a Pae for Eastwoodhill, Raphaela Rose said it was the kind of project you dream of when you first start architecture school. ahha’s design is a series of seats on a ridgeline above Gisborne that follows an ancestral pathway and was once used as a place to share knowledge of the stars.
Ethical practice
ahha is an architecture practice with offices in Auckland and Wānaka. A B Corp certified social enterprise with three directors, ahha describes itself as “a team of values-led designers, makers and facilitators”.
Every ahha project is measured against “the ahha Impact Framework: a self-developed holistic approach that tangibly measures a project’s impact across six key domains.”
Raphaela Rose, the director leading the Eastwoodhill design, is a registered architect and ahha’s regenerative and participatory design lead. She also leads ahha’s Equity & Access and Community & Culture portfolios, and is a Green Star Accredited Professional.
In 2024 she won the Interior Awards Emerging Design Professional Award. The judges called her “part artist, environmental caretaker and pop-punk political force of nature”.
ahha leans on natural and local materials like locally sourced stones, rammed earth, and timbers.
“We believe that designs have deeper integrity when informed by the cultural landscape so our process is one of collaborative creation and acknowledged partnership,” Raphaela says.
That is how the Eastwoodhill design came about. ahha’s concept has “grown out of ongoing conversations with local iwi, Te Whānau-a-Kai together with stakeholders, helping shape both concept and creative direction.”
A living archive
ahha’s concept describes the Eastwoodhill Pae as a living archive shaped by movement, encounter and exchange. The site is an ancient pathway but the Pae is a reason to stop and reflect.
The design holds three interconnected segments acknowledging the guardians of this place as enduring presences rather than distant figures.
Those guardians are Te Whānau-a-Kai, Douglas Cook and H.B. Williams. Each segment has a seat, and visitors are invited “to reflect on these guardians’ legacies and to acknowledge their own participation in an ongoing, regenerative practice of stewardship.”
ahha want the Pae to be one that “empowers visitors to look forward as custodians”, encouraging “the regeneration of whenua and whakapapa together, enacted through attention, reciprocity, and storytelling.”
“Paererewā offers an interesting provocation of how a design can connect to a place and community as it exists in its current context but with an understanding that this will evolve through a 1000-year lifespan and how a design can adapt for this,” Raphaela says.
Credits: Designed by ahha. Concept render by ahha. Portrait of Raphaela Rose by Sophie Miya-Smith, courtesy of ahha.