Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2019 i Home New Zealand

You might have seen the recent headline on Stuff about our awards finalists: Home of the Year Finalists Not Polite. “Don’t expect architecture with good manners,” the story opened. Cough. On behalf of the magazine, I should probably apologise to our winners and finalists for being a little glib in my comments – though the point was germane. If there’s a trend in New Zealand architecture I’d like to see less of right now, it’s politeness. Politeness is okay, of course – and our winner, a concrete house by architect Jack McKinney in an Auckland heritage street – is pretty considerate of its Victorian neighbours. All too often these days, architecture seems to have made politeness the point, retreating into detail as it does so. Maybe it’s the cost of…

The vertiginous hills and dizzying slopes of Wellington are full of human interventions. Rows of homes perched precariously atop rugged slopes like so many gulls facing into the wind. Some houses seem to hold on tight and peer cautiously over plummeting cliffs, while others appear to carelessly dangle their feet over the edges of deep ravines. Holly Beals and Grayson Gilmour’s new home, overlooking Island Bay and Cook Strait, is such a place. At the end of an anonymous cul-de-sac, past a gate you nearly miss, and then down a narrow walkway of many, many steps, you find it with its back to the hill, its feet dangling and face presented to the wind. As it gazes across Island Bay and out to sea, the house also appears to float…

How did you work out where to place the elements of the home on the property and in relation to each other? We walked the property and tested two sites, with this one becoming the preferred. We liked its exposure to key views, together with its undulating topography. We then set out to arrange a series of pavilions individually orientated to focus on key views. The living pavilion focuses to The Remarkables, the main bedroom to the Soho ranges and the boys’ bedrooms sink into the land and look out to The Remarkables, but with quite a different relationship to the land. It seems you had the dream architect-client relationship. There was a great deal of trust and freedom to allow us to engage in an analytical and creative process. Also,…

Could you explain the creative thinking that went into deciding the final design. The process was quite a collaborative one with three firms of architects, Willis Bond and history of the project. The reference design that was provided as part of the project was critiqued. In the bid phase, the question was raised about the building’s most appropriate relationship with the park – the default position was to put the tallest building at the park edge, but Mark McGuinness [of Willis Bond] asked the question of putting a lower-scale building adjacent to the park and a taller one behind it. This triggered the response that followed. From that simple question, the design response flowed – interesting outcomes can evolve from these group interactions. You say that the design offers the…

The first time architect Vaughn McQuarrie met his clients on site, they were about to leave on a 12-day back-country tramp, with no fixed route and plans to sleep rough “under logs and rocks”. The conceptual die was cast: a ‘Bivvy’ house. As McQuarrie looked around the building platform, carved out of a sub-alpine, schist-heavy hillside above the Queenstown-Glenorchy Rd, he had a further thought. “We began to imagine the house was formed around large fragments left during the excavation – a rock bivvy, perhaps.” Bivouacs by definition are insubstantial. By contrast, the house that McQuarrie designed for Australia-based Alan Luckie and Jen Arnold feels hewn by natural forces, all heft and raw elements. A series of stepping stones curve through scree towards an opening in the house’s angular concrete…

We got a bit lost on the way to the Bivvy Hut, and ended up making a lovely detour to Moke Lake and Closeburn Station. The site of high-country tussock and craggy hills were particularly affecting for our South American guests. We finally arrived at Vaughn McQuarrie’s Bivvy Hut – a fractured, twisted house built from tilt-slab concrete that seems to rise from the very rocks the building site was hewn from. Inside, the theme continues, with rough-sawn ply on the walls and oddly shaped door openings that force you to slow down and make your way through. Conceived as a sort of glorified camping bivouac, it’s a delightfully stripped-back experience, with deliberately compressed and contained spaces. Rather than a widescreen panorama, the view opens up in moments. Complex and interesting:…

You can’t miss our Home of the Year 2019 – it’s two doors along from our 2016 winner, the home of architect Richard Naish. On a quiet street in Grey Lynn, Auckland, otherwise filled with pretty little villas, a clutch of contemporary houses both fit in and stand out thanks to a quirk in heritage planning rules. Jack McKinney’s house for Cameron Ireland and family is something else, though, with its soaring ‘diagrid’ roof of raw concrete beams floating above the living spaces and extending outside. It’s a confident, even playful house – Ireland left the concrete raw, as it came out of the formwork, jubilantly showing off the means of its construction. When we climbed the entry stairs and walked into the house, it felt both grand and casual,…

“The Axis building was converted by Patterson Architects in 1991 from a Nestlé chocolate factory into a mixed-used development of offices, restaurants, showrooms and apartments on the top floor. As a model for what a city building can be, it doesn’t get better. The mixed use means the four-storey building is occupied 24/7. During the day the offices, food and beverage and retail hum with activity. During the later hours, the apartment dwellers and Cibo restaurant pick up pace to keep the building buzzing with life. It’s extremely communal, there’s always activity and you never feel alone or unsafe. The building stock is heritage excellence. Its scale is elegant, fronting onto two roads with thick masonry walls that create beautiful deep reveals. The 90s refurbishment includes an insertion of bold…

Patrick Reynolds The photographer and urban-issues activist shot our winning Home of the Year, p.70. What did you make of our Home of the Year? I love the in-situ concrete, much rougher than has been the norm lately, and its counterpoint to the smoother surfaces used throughout, especially the steel-clad hall. And certainly the drama of the slicing diagrid floating above the entire main floor. I also love the way the house orients to the street, almost the perfect balance of public/private. What are you working on at the moment? I’ve just released the first of a suite of four architectural guide books to New Zealand cities in collaboration with John Walsh. They’re pocket-sized walking guides to our urban architectural heritage. I’m loving shooting these gems from all eras. As…

What was the design brief from the client? The developers have done a lot of work in Dunedin over the years and know and love the city and its buildings. Their brief was to convert the building into a hotel which would be attractive for guests staying a night or two, but with the capacity for longer stays. They wanted something that would attract the most interesting and interested visitors – a place for forward thinkers, curious people. We all agreed it was to be an inner-city hideaway – a place for the conscious traveller to have an authentic Dunedin experience. Tell us about your design approach in this heritage-industrial building. The Category 2 heritage-listed building was built in 1910 by engineers and importers Chambers & Sons – hence the name –…

In 50 words or less, tell us what you do and why you do it. I aim to create original objects and spaces that are deceptively simple. I focus on fundamental forms that are free of superfluous detail in the hope that they will have permanence. I want to make everyday objects that are beautiful to the eye and enjoyable to use. Tell us a bit about your background, where you grew up, studied and your career path. I grew up in a creative environment on a farm south of Auckland. My aunty across the paddock taught me to paint and draw when I was young and I made clothing and printed t-shirts throughout my school years. I was always visually critiquing everything I saw, fascinated by things I liked…

Chilean architects Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen’s practice is intellectual and rigorous, emotional and playful in equal measures. Through their practice, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, they have an almost taxonomic approach to architecture. They repeat forms with the idea that, at least conceptually, they’re producing nothing new. In this way, their projects are connected; part of a progression. They rethink aspects of one project in the next – referencing previous work, but without pastiche. In a few residential designs, they’ve explored the notion of a central void: leaving void as void, filling it with a staircase, leaving it open to the elements. At Solo Pezo in Cretas, north-east Spain, they’ve again explored the theme. This time the void is filled with a square pool in the centre of a tiled…

“It’s sort of simple on purpose,” says architect Jack McKinney, self-deprecatingly of our Home of the Year 2019. McKinney designed the home in Grey Lynn, Auckland, for his long-time clients and friends, builder Cameron Ireland and Rachael Newnham, and their three children. “Sometimes a project depends on whether it’s immaculately perfect, where this lines up with that. But what we’ve learned with Cam is that his mind is an impatient one. So we had to come up with something that was a big shape, robust enough to survive a bit of editing onsite.” By McKinney’s count, he and Ireland have built 11 alterations, three commercial buildings, four-and-a-half new houses “and two billboards” over 12 years. It’s an extraordinary output that speaks to an ongoing friendship and trust that has developed,…

Surely a site like this fills you with trepidation? Tim Gittos— No, it was great – all these constraints breed a lot of creativity. Are sections like this – cheap but difficult – increasingly sought after in Wellington? Caro Robertson— Certainly. We take on ground issues that most firms don’t want to do. What we always tell people is that you are going to spend some money getting the site to the point where you can build. We say that the $100,000 or whatever you spend bringing the site up to buildable condition is considered part of your land cost. Did this site need much work? TG— No. But we put the weight – the concrete – at the back where the existing cutting was, and made the house lighter…

Come up the stone stairs and through the courtyard of this Arrowtown home, between buildings of schist and Corten steel, and a tall brass door is set into an angular concrete portal. It’s a suitably dramatic, yet sympathetic, first impression. Faced with mountain views on all sides, architect Richard Naish of RTA Studio broke the house down into chunks, each with its own aspect and contrasting materials. Bedrooms are clad in Corten steel and the living areas in schist, while the entry is set apart in fractured tilt-slab concrete that seems to mimic the faceted lines of the mountain behind. Exterior concrete has been coloured with Peter Fell PFL677, a slate-like tone that works beautifully with the schist in the courtyard and the surrounding mountainscape. Inside the home, polished concrete…

Not so long ago, Stuart Gardyne spent a night at the house he designed on Great Barrier Island, only to discover that the neighbours use the place as a thoroughfare to reach other homes. He got talking with them, and it quickly became apparent some are less than fond of their urbane, intellectual neighbour, with its hooded eyes and inward focus. They found it austere and closed. “It doesn’t have the cottagey charm,” says Gardyne, of Wellington-based architecture +. In fairness, the house isn’t closed, and it’s far from unwelcoming, though it does have an attractively monolithic look that might be perceived as imposing. Set on a garden block down a long driveway, the grassy approach is deliberately informal. There isn’t a front door: a stroll across the lawn takes…

How did clients from Australia come to approach an architect from Waiheke? They found me on the internet, via another project I had done down south that they liked. We met up initially in Auckland to discuss the project, then on site in Queenstown. I’m from Southland, so I’m very familiar with the area, which helped. The design is quite unlike your previous work. I wouldn’t say it is different to my previous work in that it’s still a direct response to context and client brief. It’s unlike my previous work only because this house is in a sub-alpine environment, whereas the others tend to be in a subtropical environment. You can’t compare houses in these different environments like for like. There are few square angles in the house –…

It was one of those gloriously dry Central Otago afternoons: the hills were brown, the sun was yellow and the sky was blue. This made the arrival at the Arrowtown House by Richard Naish all the more spectacular – you approach on a long, gravel road and ascend the steps into quite a formal courtyard, around which are scattered five individual structures. It’s an extraordinary house, clad in local schist and Corten steel, which references the history of mining in the area. Through the brass front door is a concrete-and-glass portal linking two of the wings, while the guest bedrooms are reached outside and across the courtyard – a brave but wonderful call in this alpine climate. It was the way the land flowed around the house that we loved…

Architectus last featured in Home of the Year back in 1998, with a house designed for Patrick Clifford’s brother at Te Horo, on the Kapiti coast. It was a couple of years before the practice won the first Home of the Year, with Clifford’s seminal design in Remuera. In the years since, the practice has transitioned to larger-scale projects – schools, master planning and now, multi-residential. But the thinking is the same: at Wynyard Central, we loved the thoughtful planning, the generosity of space, use of materials and the creation of laneways between the three buildings. It was blowing a gale the day we visited, yet on the covered decks it was still – you could imagine the doors open here year round. This is what apartment buildings in Auckland should…

1996 Now considered an architectural classic, Patrick Clifford designed this Auckland home for his family. 1997 Twin townhouses by Felicity Wallace overcome multiple challenges on a small urban site. 2002 Stevens Lawson pays homage to New Zealand mid-century classics in this suburban dwelling. 2003 Ken Crosson’s 120-square-metre Coromandel holiday home achieved outstanding simplicity. 2008 The ‘Signal Box’ in Masterton by Melling Morse is a rational, yet poetic, design on a humble site. 2009 A home on Waiheke Island by Mitchell Stout stands strong and enigmatic. 2014 Twin cabins on the Kaipara Harbour by Nat Cheshire of Cheshire Architects. 2015 Richard Naish designed the ‘E-Type’ house for his family in Grey Lynn, Auckland. 1998 A Bay of Islands retreat by Pete Bossley of Bossley Architects was conceived as an encampment. 1999…

Kosmos 6 April – 28 July 2019 City Gallery Te Ngākau Civic Square, 101 Wakefield St, Wellington citygallery.org.nz How did you become an artist? I always wanted to be an artist. I went to a Catholic girls’ school. Art was on the curriculum, but there was no proper teaching, no workshops, no making things. All we did was draw still lifes on sheets of A4 paper. I went to art school in Dublin, then did my degree at the University of Ulster, Belfast. Your work is said to be influenced by classical architecture, minimalism, politics, spirituality and power. How does power play out in your work? I don’t specifically seek out power as a subject but the physicality of the work points to the often arbitrary or archaic structures of power…

AUCKLAND Thursday 16 May, 8am Objectspace 13 Rose Road, Ponsonby THE DETAILS Since forming his own practice in 2002 – first with Brian Windeatt, and more recently on his own – Auckland-based McKinney has worked across an intriguing mix of commercial, hospitality and residential projects. McKinney’s work is marked by a dedication to rich materials, dynamic spaces and a constantly evolving design language. In his own house in Kingsland, he subverted the classic villa profile to create pyramid forms, pulling light into the living areas. For ‘Diagrid’ house, he designed a floating concrete roof with rough-cast beams. At Amano – the celebrated downtown eatery – he peeled back layers to expose the bones of a century-old warehouse that contrasts with luxe touches including a terrazzo floor. McKinney is known for…

The Paraguayan architect on Do More With Less. The film dips into projects by young architects who introduce their practice to communities that have never known it and resolve pressing social issues with alternative economic dynamics. Using labour exchanges, bartering and workshops, they build with minimal budgets that result in tactile, rough-hewn solutions. Their collective approach aims to resolve problems that all societies face – regardless of wealth – without waiting for politicians to catch up. The architects in the film apply resourceful techniques to resolve residential and commercial projects. Is this a way for the future? The reason for our discipline is to contribute to the constitution of a better society, a scenario in which we have the opportunity to live better – there is no mandate outside of…

Sophie Wylie, Artifact— “I live here with my husband and our three children – a five year old, four year old and two-and-a-half year old. The kids love to play outside so it was interesting having a really urban home for them – the courtyard works well, with enough surface area for them to play. We also have parks around us, which makes a difference. The kids colonise the sunken living room as their snug and playroom. It’s quite a big house, with four bedrooms on a small plot of land. There’s a neighbouring commercial building, two houses behind us, and a heritage overlay, so it was a challenge to work with. It’s a constrained site with an efficient build in the sense that it has been extruded into a…

Rather than make a modern shopfront out of a building that had been changed relentlessly over the years, the new Deadly Ponies store is more itself than it has been in decades. “The place had been changed so much over the years, just messed around with every time it was touched,” says Deadly Ponies managing director Steve Boyd, of the building in Ponsonby, Auckland. The building – which started life as a sailors’ boarding house in the mid-19th century, with a predictable level of notoriety – has had various lives. It was most recently home to Sunbeam Glass Studios, owned by glass artist Gary Nash. In the 1980s, Nash added a vast stables-like building out the back for his workshop, and converted the original building as a gallery for his…

Not since the original timber clunkers of the early days have surfboards genuinely aligned with a surfer’s ethos of connecting with nature. Riding glass filaments and petroleum-based polyurethane slapped with a cocktail of toxic compounds is quite the disconnect. But a breakthrough discovery by Tauranga-based board maker Paul Barron has the potential to reshape the surf industry, as well as impact others. After years of testing and refining, Barron’s wool-composite technology is replacing fibreglass and foam traditionally used in board making. His collaboration with New Zealand Merino and California-based Firewire Surfboards – co-owned by world-champion surfer and environmental activist Kelly Slater – has spawned the Woolight board, which is due for release in New Zealand in May. “We all know we ride a product that harms the environment and wool boards…

From Sydney to Santiago and Hobart to Hastings, Auckland Art Fair draws on a wealth of emerging and established talent that will be on show for five days at The Cloud, on Auckland’s waterfront. A fixture of the contemporary art event is the Projects Programme, a platform for largely unrepresented emerging talent to exhibit their work. This year’s title for the programme is ‘Whanaungatanga’, which loosely means kinship. Headed by Francis McWhannell, the arts writer and curator invited last year’s alumni of nine artists and one curator to nominate this year’s talent. As well as new names to discover, exhibiting established artists include Fiona Pardington Gretchen Albrecht, Lisa Reihana, John Reynolds, Terry Stringer and Heather Straka. A broader look at the industry will be discussed in ‘Future of Art’, a…

The 1970s were an important decade for John Scott, a time when he produced many of the mid-career works on which his architectural reputation now rests. He began the decade with a recognised masterpiece in the form of the Martin House (1969-70). The Rogers House (1975), a modest house built by its owner, came in the middle of the decade, and the Arrowsmith House (1978-80), brought the decade to a close. Each of these houses, and the experience of building them, was very different, reflecting the cultural and economic changes that occurred along the way. This was also the period in which Scott put down his thoughts in his only major interview – ‘Of Woolsheds, Houses and People’ – published in the periodical Islands in 1973. Together this interview and these three houses…

You’ve worked with Cam on many projects – how does this affect the way you design for him? We have a body of work that we are always trying to surpass. Finding new outcomes keeps both of us interested. We are currently exploring concrete construction, with each project slightly more ambitious in methodology or result. Because Cam is the builder and client, it allows more experimentation than you ever could within a normal client, architect and builder relationship. Tell us about the collaborative process. Everyone involved has a good eye and good ideas, so I wanted Cam and Rachael to have input as the job progressed. I resolved planning and siting, with the strategy to establish a strong sculptural idea – heavy concrete lattice balanced on a podium – that…

Rather like an English teacher tasking students to write an essay with no topic or word limit, this Arrowtown site posed an immense challenge: an over-abundance of opportunity. In usual circumstances, the parameters of possibility are clear: ring-fenced by section size, concerns about privacy, height-to-boundary considerations, how to capture the most sunlight, or constrain the view. But what if the view is a spectacle of 360-degree awesomeness? The Wakatipu Basin is the hole in the geological doughnut of frosted, jagged peaks that rise from the valley in a wraparound panorama that can be overwhelming. When architect Richard Naish of RTA Studio first walked this landscape with his clients, a sculptor and a graphic designer, it was to demarcate a building site. “Very unusually, we had the freedom to choose,” says Naish. They…

It wasn’t so long ago that Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter was a nature-stripped industrial area that had done its days in the timber trade before turning to storing petrochemicals as the ‘Tank Farm’. The flat patch of reclaimed peninsula with boats berthed at its fringes was gritty and uninviting. When the sea breeze dropped, dank aromas from the few greasy spoons that fed local workers hung in the air. “We like using good materials, and the relationships between them are about as important as the materials themselves.” That was until 2011, when $120 million was poured into developing new public parks and events spaces – it was stage one of a revitalisation and regeneration programme that will continue for about 20 years. With a change of direction, the public started to utilise this…

The project started as a ‘courtyard’ house but evolved – what was the key to unlocking the design? Enclosure can be achieved in many ways, as can connections to garden and outdoor spaces. The qualities of a courtyard can be achieved using planting and hedges; it’s not necessary to fully enclose with walls. The plan is quite unprogrammed in some ways – has the family inhabited the house in ways you didn’t expect? No two people will inhabit a house in the same way, so we like to design loose-fit rather than deterministic spaces. These spaces can adapt or change depending on who or how many people are there, the seasons, the weather, the time of day, and the occasion. We anticipate the family will use the house in many…

Judging Home of the Year is intense, of course – long days and early starts, a madcap dash around the country in a bewildering number of rental cars and planes. But as a way of seeing the country, visiting architecture can’t be beaten – from houses in the inner city to expansive rural retreats, you’re reminded of the sheer variety of both our landscapes and the buildings that we put in them. Here, then, are our 2019 highlights. ITINERARY Monday 18 February Queenstown Tuesday 19 February Wellington Wednesday 20 February Wellington & Auckland Thursday 21 February Auckland Friday 22 February Great Barrier Island 2019 JUDGES Gloria Cabral gabdearq.com Lance and Nicola Herbst herbstarchitects.co.nz Simon Farrell-Green homemagazine.co.nz…

I’d like to think the presence of a three-week-old baby – Billie, who slept peacefully the whole time – didn’t influence the judges. But it was hard not to grin visiting the modest, clever little house of Grayson Gilmour and partner Holly Beals, designed by Caro Robertson and Tim Gittos. Built on an impossible site – steep as all hell, with no road access – the design elegantly overcomes the slope, placing the upper storey on an angle over the lower to create two sheltered outdoor living areas. You approach down a long flight of steps and enter through a sliding door: it’s casual and intimate, with interesting, dynamic spaces. At just 93 square metres, it was by far the smallest house we visited on the tour – yet it…

We flew to Great Barrier Island early, ahead of a tropical cyclone threatening to sweep over New Zealand, and stayed at Lance and Nicola’s iconic inside-out bach in the sand hills at Medlands Beach. A short stroll away, the ‘Pinwheel’ house by Stuart Gardyne presented a very different – though no less appealing – sort of experience. Down a long driveway, the two-storey house is crisp and urbane, with planes and shields of aluminium and cedar. Originally conceived as a courtyard house, the plan evolved to create four sheltered spaces on each side, with four equally sized bedrooms upstairs. American ash runs across floors and walls, while the owners’ collection of classic contemporary furniture is both casual and crisp. A fine house. Project ‘Pinwheel’ house Practice architecture + Design Stuart…

As the finalist designs in Home of the Year show, New Zealand architects continue to push boundaries – Home of the Year 2019 saw six striking projects taking new directions and inspirations. It’s something Altherm Window Systems has been proud to support through its sponsorship of Home of the Year for the past decade. But the brand also supports innovative design every day, working with architects to push design boundaries, at the same time as providing high-performing solutions for all seasons and climates. Colour trends You can hardly have missed the move to recessive cladding – homes increasingly blend in with New Zealand’s stunning natural landscape, often in shades of black or brown. Window joinery has followed suit, with a range of colours including black, brown and bronze, either in…

MAY In Conversation with Home of the Year winner Jack McKinney JUNE Design Awards call to entry JULY Kitchen Day, Auckland AUGUST Design Awards winner and finalists announced SEPTEMBER HOME Tour Wellington OCTOBER NOVEMBER HOME Tour Auckland Home of the Year call to entries DECEMBER Home of the Year entries close FEBRUARY Home of the Year judging and international judge events MARCH Home of the Year finalists announced  homemagazine.co.nz Filter opener A renovation by Jack McKinney at ‘The Stables’ in Auckland. For more information, turn to In Conversation, p.173, our hosted event with architect Jack McKinney.…

I was in Sandringham, Auckland, when we heard about the Christchurch killings. Twenty years ago, I would’ve been lucky to get a pie from a dairy for dinner. Now it’s a vibrant precinct of mostly Indian and Pakistani shops, restaurants and spice warehouses where I often get dinner or buy ingredients for my own inadequate attempts at a good curry. As an architecture lecturer, I often tell my students what Auckland city centre was like in the 1980s. After midday on Saturday there was nothing to eat until the White Lady burger cart appeared in the early evening. Our cities were stagnant and their centres were dead. As overseas visitors often said, New Zealand was closed evenings and weekends. In recent years, we have experienced a startling transformation; our cities are…