Perched on a slope above Lyttelton Harbour in New Zealand, Bull O’Sullivan Architecture’s Chapel of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (2025) is a 17 m² sacred shelter that condenses ritual, material ancestry, and quiet contemplation into a remarkably modest form.
The architecture begins with its siting and orientation. The chapel gazes toward Ripapa Island, a site rich with Māori history, folding into its design an attentive link to place and memory. The choice to gift this work to the public of Christchurch speaks to the project’s civic intimacy: private in scale, public in intention. The firm’s belief in “quality and optimism at the most personal level” resonates here: the chapel insists on devotion without grandiosity.
Its exterior envelope is composed of a custom aluminium weatherboard, used sparingly across the firm’s portfolio, which abstracts traditional cladding into a sleek, light-catching shell. The triangular entrance is a bold formal gesture — an architectural meditation on the Trinity — and the seat beside the door invites a ritual pause before entry, a threshold between secular and sacred.
Inside, the material narrative deepens. The interior is lined with native rimu timber whose provenance threads deep time: once submerged in a river for centuries, whose fir growth postdates Christ, whose grain now envelops worship. At the heart, Johnny Hauraki’s carving of Jesus and the cross from rescued heart-kauri — one arm down — gestures not toward suffering but the threshold of resurrection. This is a sculptural intervention that extends the theological metaphor of beginning rather than end.
Complementary details crystallize the chapel’s character: a chocolate‑brown New Zealand wool carpet grounds the experience underfoot, and a kneeler by Glenn Whatmough of the Smithery (also heart‑kauri) extends the material logic into gesture. The space was consecrated on 1 October 2024 — the feast of St. Thérèse — affirming the project’s liturgical and symbolic alignment. Here, in minimal volume, the architecture becomes a vessel of gratitude and reflection, a light and tactile vessel for smallness.
