Innholdsfortegnelse for February - March 2021 i Home New Zealand

There’s nothing quite like an alpine landscape, or, for that matter, a coastal one — especially in New Zealand. Many of the projects featured in this issue sit beneath a mountain range or close to the water’s edge. Those that don’t offer the distinctive rhetoric of Kiwi suburbia — some turning inwards, others embracing urban features. Under large skies sliced from below by voluminous peaks is the home on our cover, designed by Mason & Wales Architects. It’s a place of angles and proportions that engulfs the drama of its Central Otago setting. In juxtaposition, The Dune House at Tara Iti in Mangawhai, featured on page 84, offers a similar sense of scale, this time on a coastal site bounded by both forest and dunescape. Here, Cheshire Architects devised a holiday home that…

Angles strike the visitor everywhere, beginning at the front gate. To start with, the steep incline of the street seems to emphasise the angle of the monopitch roof. Yet it is the diamond-pattern aluminium screen dominating the front of this abode that proudly states the design’s angularity. Simon Hall of Jerram Tocker Barron Architects says the owners were happy to push out the boundaries of their new home, hence making the trapezoidal, sloping site a main component of the design. However, the steepness of the site and the proximity of the street meant privacy was a challenge. Anyone walking downhill would get a grandstand view into the home’s main living area and the bedroom. Yet, while the outlook of the house was at 90 degrees to the street frontage, Simon…

Auckland Art Fair, 24–28 February, The Cloud, Auckland Waterfront, artfair.co.nz…

From the classic and delicate Heke Street house in Freemans Bay (Mitchell Stout, 1988) to Guy Tarrant’s Point Chevalier courtyard house (finalist in the 2017 Home of the Year awards), courtyard houses have a solid grounding in our local architectural history. This is a centuries-old typology, and courtyard houses can be found throughout the world. More relevantly for us here in New Zealand, there is a rich Asia-Pacific cultural heritage to draw inspiration from when considering a building that utilises interior garden or courtyard areas. Interior courtyards incorporated into buildings are often found in Japanese architecture, for example. Tsubo-niwa are very small interior courtyards which allow additional sunlight into buildings while also providing natural views into the space from the building. Locally, whether on semi-rural sites or suburban sites, designers are…

Denys Watkins Auckland I live in a villa on the edge of the city. It has a large garden and the house is situated on the corner of the street. There are two studios, mine and my wife’s. She is a ceramist working with clay, whereas I mainly work in painted imagery and works on paper. I began a series of works in late 2019 before Covid. These loose concepts addressed issues of hygiene, deodorants, words that identify products with cosmetic associations. Socially, the first lockdown seemed upbeat: families walking and cycling in groups, talking and engaging with other people. Yet, a sense of the unknown seemed apparent. Tyne Gordon Christchurch I enjoyed lockdown. It forced me to slow down, magnifying the joy in everyday domestic rituals. I really appreciated…

In one of Christchurch’s most traditional suburbs, post-earthquake development has been varied. Merivale remains an area steeped in history but is now home to both intensive residential developments and the large homes of old, surrounded by the gardens that defined the suburb pre-quakes. In the case of this house, the site became the real inspiration after a damaged Californian bungalow was demolished, leaving just the splendour of a garden that had been delicately manicured over the last quarter-century. “The garden the owners had created over the last 25 years was just incredible,” architect Michael O’Sullivan of Bull O’Sullivan Architecture says. “The earthquakes have provided a unique opportunity to put homes on properties that have well-established and really thoughtful gardens, and this site was extraordinary in that regard.” Perhaps appropriately, the…

Rick and Lesley gave you a very detailed, three-page brief. Was it helpful? Tim: Yes. Clearly, Rick and Lesley have been used to writing those kinds of documents in their professional lives. It was absolutely the clearest brief I’ve had, but it wasn’t too prescriptive. I always say that a good architectural brief is about how you want to live rather than stating that it should look like this or that. So that was really useful for us, having that all information to make decisions from. It is more balls in the air that you can consider and juggle. How did you cope with the conservative budget? Ana: We kept the geometry of the house as simple as we could to try to make it as cost-effective as we could.…

Andrew Urquhart You shot the Luggate House for us. What did you enjoy most about this house? I think this house could be described as an elegant back-country hut. It uses simple materials, and simple forms, yet has a surprisingly comfortable and spacious feel despite its small footprint. What is it that caught your attention about architectural photography? I initially trained to be an architect. I worked as a graduate before giving up the office life to work on the land and take photos on the side — so, an eye for composition and detail in architecture was already honed in a little. I think architectural photography draws many parallels to the design process itself; you have to unpick the designer’s intent to find the special moments. The alpine environment you…

Glass-blowing is a dangerous art. “It’s hot, heavy, and you’re constantly moving around a material at temperatures of up to 1100°C. You’ve got to be quick on your feet, smooth, and focused,” Whanganui-based glass-blower Katie Brown says. Katie’s workspace, at subfloor level in the former heart of local rag the Whanganui Chronicle, has a public viewing gallery above to allow people interested in the art to come and view her in action. It’s perhaps not what many may expect. It’s a gritty place; it’s grimy and dirty, but “the glass always comes out of this gritty environment absolutely pristine,” she says. It’s a serious business working with temperatures this high, and it’s not for everyone. However, for Katie it has been a lifelong journey that began 25 years ago when…

Inspired in form by Richard Neutra’s iconic Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, this home in Remuera, Auckland, was designed for a couple who wanted to spend a significant amount of time working from home and enjoying the expansive garden area. Although dissimilar in layout to the Kaufmann House, the ethos for the design comes from the intentions of mid-century modernism, architect Darren Jessop explains. In this case, the house came before the landscape, so landscape architect Jared Lockhart was presented with a finished build to work around; the only part of the former garden that remained was perimeter hedging. This is a house of elegant materiality; overhanging eaves; and a sleek composition of glass, zinc, concrete, and vertical cedar. The entrance is to the south and receives little sun, but it is a dramatic…

“About eight years ago, we were scratching around last minute trying to find somewhere to go on holiday and I happened to find this house available in the Bay of Islands. I couldn’t understand why it was still available because it was absolutely fabulous,” owner Roger recalls about the first time he and his wife Louise visited the Bay of Islands. While they were on that holiday, they discovered that a family friend had some sections for sale near where they were staying. “That got us thinking, because we fell in love with the place,” Roger recollects. After a visit to Stahl House — a modernist house in the Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, designed by architect Pierre Koenig, one of the Case Study Houses — two years later, the couple realised the potential lying dormant…

Here, in the shadow of the Southern Alps and adjacent to the crystal-clear waters of the Clutha River, the winters are confronting. They’re bone-chillingly cold, especially when the inversion layer drops — often for days or weeks — leaving residents caught below low cloud in freezing temperatures. However, it is a place of extreme contrasts. In summer, the days are long, hot, and dry — the Central Otago region often records the hottest temperatures in the country. It’s in that context of extremes that architect Beth Chaney-Walker of Chaney & Norman Architects and her husband, boat builder Marc Walker, decided to build a home that would become a showcase of what’s possible in terms of performance and scale. “From a professional point of view, I really wanted our home to be a showcase…

One of the earliest photographers of the brutalist movement, French-born architectural photographer Matthieu Salvaing has had an interesting life. Close friends with Oscar Niemeyer, collaborator with the stylish film director Wong Kar-Wai, the camera-toting, jet-setter is obviously doing more than just documenting; rather, he is seeing interiors and design from a perspective that fits well within the artistic. This immaculately art-directed — by Atelier Franck Durand — book is Salvaing’s first monogram and includes 25 projects in places such as Brazil, Mexico, Japan, France, and beyond. It’s a genre-defying, highly individualistic travelogue by a photographer with enviable access to quirky architectural spaces and an equally unique and refined vision. “Why are there so few good buildings? Good buildings with Chinese cultural characteristics? Why does almost every city seem to look the same?…

“It was a dirty place where people used to go to shoot rats,” Peter explains. Forty-two years later, Hamilton Gardens is known the world over. It attracts more than a million visitors every year, with upwards of 5000 people a day visiting in the summer months. Peter’s original vision was one in which there were a range of different styles of garden. “I had been on my OE and seen all sorts of museums overseas, and I realised that they all told a story. Often, less focus was put on artefacts and more on the narrative and that’s what I wanted to achieve with this design,” he says. Hamilton Gardens now has 17 different gardens within its grounds, telling the story of gardens from the stone age through until present day…

There is an intrinsic quaintness to repurposed stone-barn architecture. Its olde-worlde materiality speaks of a — more often than not — romanticised version of farming that is part cinematic and part hunting-lodge chic. This home — designed by Mason & Wales Architects and composed of traditional rural structures with a contemporary twist — fits firmly within that realm of the idealised pastoral. According to project lead Francis Whitaker, the owner wanted “simple, pure, elegant stone barns”. The architect talks of the beauty of these rural structures, which came to New Zealand during early European migrations. The home has been a success in the richest way possible, gently and calmly developing over the past decade and a half “They were robust and, in a way, cheap, with the only expense being labour,” explains Francis.…

Few hallways come with a good story. However, it so happens that the fine, timber-lined one in the handsome Wellington home of Rick Wells and Lesley Haines does. The story begins in a river in the Wairarapa. The couple had recently engaged Tim and Ana of Lovell & O’Connell Architects to create a new home for them in the charming seaside suburb of Days Bay, when Rick took a phone call. “Friends in Martinborough rang to tell me that a contractor with rights to take timber had pulled four tōtara logs from the Ruamahanga River, and did I want them,” he recalls. “I went up to have a look at them, and ended up buying them.” A fine investment for sure, particularly for a keen amateur woodworker such as Rick. What…

Daphnes Bar Taverna is expected to open in the coming weeks. What is it and how did the idea for this come about? Daphnes is a modern Greek bar taverna. The fascination with Greek food came from our family sabbatical to the Greek islands, especially Paros, in 2018, Once back in Auckland, we managed to find the perfect space, fell in love with it, and slowly it comes to fruition. It is an interesting time to be opening a new hospitality business. How are you future-proofing it? Yes, it is an interesting time, but we can’t sit still for another year, then we will be out of the game. We see it as an exciting time to open — people can’t travel so how about we give them a bit…