Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2017 i Home New Zealand

HOME’s signature event returns for 2017: led by HOME editor Simon Farrell-Green, we’ll visit five of the most experienced heads in the design business to hear what’s exciting them most about the year ahead, and catch up on the latest from the Milan Furniture Fair. The day starts at 9am, finishes around 5pm and includes a restaurant lunch, and a well-deserved glass of wine at the end of the day. Tickets are limited to 50, so be sure to buy your tickets early to avoid missing out. (If you’re in Christchurch, keep an eye out for your event later in the year.) For tickets, please visit eventopia.co/stylesafari2017 . Tickets cost $90 and include transport for the day and lunch. For further information, please contact homenewzealand@bauermedia.co.nz…

A duo from different design disciplines shares a new one. The Ace Firers are artists Emily Siddell and Mark Goody, who are recent ceramicists and make bowls, cups, plates and vessels by hand at Siddell’s studio in Sandringham, Auckland. “First and foremost,” says Siddell, “we tend to make things we want to use ourselves.” Siddell is well known for her work making delicate leis from glass, pieces that are at once natural and hand made – and highly collectible. A long-time collector of ceramics – just about every plate, bowl and cup in her house is by studio potters – she began making ceramics a couple of years ago, taking classes with Peter Lange. Goody comes from a painting background, although he was originally a signwriter: he switched to ceramics…

The long, winding drive up to Lake Waikaremoana in January left me wondering if John Scott’s architectural masterpiece, the Aniwaniwa Visitor Centre – demolished in September last year – will become the architectural equivalent of the Pink and White Terraces, post-1886 eruption. Maybe, in the future, others like me will make the pilgrimage up the interminable, unsealed road to behold the space where the building once stood. The site might come to mark one of the greatest no-longer-existent taonga of our cultural history. On January 6 this year, when my brother Brendan and I visited, all that remained of the modernist structure was a pile of rubble. Five months earlier – on the evening Victoria University Press was launching Nick Bevin’s and my book, Futuna, Life of a Building, about…

How badly was the original house damaged in the earthquakes? The original house and garage were seriously affected by liquefaction. The house sank 350mm and the garage 450mm. The garage was also affected by ground displacement, it moved 400mm. The blockwork walls of the house cracked in many places and so did the brickwork of the two chimneys (but they remained standing until we had them taken down for safety reasons). The windows jammed and would not open. The drains (old clay pipes) were all broken and the underground power cables in the street were broken. We had no power for six weeks and no sewage for five months – a chemical toilet instead. We continued to live in the house until it was about to be demolished. What was the…

Architect . . . . . Tobin Smith, CoLab Architecture Text . . . . . . . . . . . . Penny Lewis Photography. . Simon Devitt Location . . . . . . . Lyttelton, Christchurch Brief . . . . . . . . . . . . .A main bathroom in the Kelleher family home that doubles as a guest WC. How does this bathroom differ from the bathroom downstairs? Tim Kelleher: The downstairs bathroom has no bath; it’s mainly for our kids when they grow up. Tobin Smith: The design veered away from the more typical approach of a separate guest powder room on the living level. Instead, we put more energy into a shared family bathroom that doubles as the guest WC. The…

I have a very clear memory of being given a bootleg tape of Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind at the back of English class by my friend Paul, who insisted that I copy it and give it back immediately. I never did: it’s still in a box under the house. I hadn’t listened to the album for years and when I did – this time on Spotify, not a scratchy cassette – I realised it wasn’t the hits that I remembered most fondly. Oh sure, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Come as You Are’ are modern masterpieces that changed music forever, but I also listened to the B sides – the tracks that didn’t make the singles charts – with intense affection. Around the same time, I was looking through old…

I had been kicking around Tucson, Arizona, for a month, taking trips with friends to the Mexican border and ghost towns in the California desert. Watching the temperature tip to 47°C, it was nearly time to go home but first, one last adventure. During my stay in Arizona, I noticed the way the desert seems to offer freedom to test ideas. Perhaps it’s the availability of affordable land, the vast space, or the type of person it attracts. Arcosanti is the perfect example. The prototype town was conceived in the 1950s by architect Paolo Soleri to back up his theoretical work, a philosophy called Archology – in short, an amalgamation of architecture and ecology. The experimental eco town, often referred to as an ‘urban laboratory’, tests a new way to…

 Location Remuera, Auckland Architect Lisa Webb, Studio LWA Text Simon Farrell-Green Photography Sam Hartnett Geoff Newman didn’t design many houses: he’s better known for his work on the Whanganui Memorial Hall and later – though less belovedly – on the Auckland Harbour Board building. But in 1963 he designed a house for the criminal lawyer Peter Williams, at the time making a name representing some of the country’s most notorious criminals, and advocating for prison reform. The house Newman designed sits at the end of a cul-de-sac in Remuera: up this quiet street you’ll find houses by Ron Sang, the Group, Claude Megson and more. Possibly because of his client’s reputation – and, the story goes, to protect the grand piano in the living room…

Your father created a home that feels intimate and calm. How did he do that? Although humble, our home also has an understated sense of elegance, poise – peacefulness even. It has nothing to do with the expensive this or that, or the plushness of that fabric, or the glamour of that other thing. The intimacy and calmness people experience here belies the artistry of the architecture, the materials used, the aspect of the property, the huge trees that surround us, the proximity to the beach and the river, the mauri of the property, the fact that our family has been here for five generations... A book could be written about it. You spent many hours in discussion with John about the design for this house – that must be…

Architect . . . . . . Andrew .Meiring, Andrew Meiring Architects Text . . . . . . . . . . . . Penny Lewis Photography. . Jackie .Meiring Location . . . . . . . Westmere, Auckland Brief . . . . . . . . . . . . In the architect’s own home, the directive was to “make the en suite nice”. When HOME featured your house (October/November 2016), you said decision making was easy for you and Helen, an architect and an industrial designer. Did the same ease apply here? Yes, we both share similar aesthetic tastes, so there were no difficulties there. What was the starting point for the materials you’ve chosen? Materially, the bathroom is an extension of rest of the…

The owner of this stunning bathroom is outgoing and loves to travel. However, when he’s at home, he’s all about entertaining, so having a luxurious, comfortable and easy-to-use guest bathroom was important. The brief given to kitchen and interior designer Celia Visser was straightforward – her client was after “contemporary pizzazz” for this bathroom, which was to include a bathtub, separate shower and vanity. The fully tiled, built-in bathtub was placed under the lower part of the raked ceiling, allowing for a central dividing wall, which features the vanity at the front and the shower area at the back. Celia chose Corian® Cameo White, a soft, chalky and natural solid white, for the bespoke vanity. She deliberately kept the lines clean and simple, with a matching moulded basin also in…

“This is not a building at all, but a little experiment. It’s a demonstration, a proof of concept, part of the School of Forestry at the University of Canterbury. The story goes that the architects, Hall & Mackenzie, designed the building with a surface effect of cast ribbed concrete, hammered back to reveal the stone aggregate. The client wasn’t convinced, so a determined Keith Mackenzie created this test structure to demonstrate the finish, prove his point and win the day. He also included some alternatives. Big mistake. Never show options! Perhaps predictably, the decision-makers went with the third option, a concrete finish that shows the imprint of the timber board formwork. Actually, it looks fantastic, and I guess the committee liked the pun of a forestry school covered in wood grain, but perhaps…

Greta van der Star A trip to the Arizona desert unearthed an alternative way of living for this photographer (p.46). What did you make of Arcosanti, the eco city by architect Paolo Soleri? He was practising some very important ideas that should be considered in all new city developments. It's a great legacy. I would like to go back, stay a while and check out more of the interiors. Could Soleri's principles be applied back here? Absolutely. His ideas about building up to avoid urban sprawl, and building smarter to have less environmental impact, are very relevant. It's as much about the human experience as it is about the environment. Urban sprawl means it's harder to get from one side of the city to the other, and time is wasted…

Objects, buildings and experiences that show the value of good design: Covetable and current designs that reference classic pieces ( p.40 ); Greta van der Star visits a 1970s utopian village in the Arizona desert ( p.46 ); Deborah Smith praises the lesser-known but most excellent Hastings City Art Gallery ( p.54 ); Gregory O’Brien mourns the demolition of Aniwaniwa and asks that something like this never happen again ( p.58 ); Lisa Webb renovates a concrete block fortress for family living ( p.62 ).…

You spent most of your career designing public buildings. How different was the experience of designing a house? Not a lot really, for me. Though it could have been as there’s a big difference with client identification. Private clearly has a lot of the personal in it, whereas public can be a lot more impersonal/institutional. It’s therefore really important in public practice to make it more personal, at least it was for me, by finding the people responsible and trying to gain access to the users or at least trying to identify with them. Sometimes that was very difficult with the sort of systems that could be in place. After all, buildings are used by people in all sorts of ways so it has to be about people, how they…

You bought the place at auction when no one else bid – what put everyone off? It’s not your quintessential Remuera gingerbread house, but that was its most enticing aspect for us. The house was largely untouched, but it had escaped a few mad schemes over the years? A renowned 90s architect had proposed a master suite addition in the form of a glass boat, among several other schemes. You’ve respected the bones, but you’ve also updated things in a few places. How do you strike that balance? I think it’s important that the new work references the original so it feels cohesive but also contemporary. The spaces are modest, but nicely proportioned. How does it work for a family of six? The house has generous outdoor areas so it’s…

Architects. . . . . .Lance and Nicola Herbst, Herbst Architects Text . . . . . . . . . . . . Penny Lewis Photography. . Patrick Reynolds Location . . . . . . . Waimauku, Auckland Brief . . . . . . . . . . . . .An en suite for the master bedroom of a new home with a bath and shower. How did the idea for the green wall between the toilet and shower evolve? Nicola Herbst: We first suggested a tree in the bathroom, then the idea of a green-wall system as a privacy screen between shower and toilet came about. In the end, it was simpler and less expensive to construct a timber screen with niches for pot plants. We…