Ivan Juriss house

We've received a lot of appreciative emails about our feature on the 1961 house by Ivan Juriss that features in our current issue. Despite being a very fine piece of architecture, the publicity-shy Juriss had never arranged for it to be published before. Although it features in our 'Before and After' issue, one of the best things about it is that it hasn't been altered at all. It was so good in the first place it's hard to imagine it needing any changes.

We received a tip-off about the home's existence from Julia Gatley, a lecturer at the School of Architecture at the University of Auckland who is writing a book about the influential Group Architects, of whom Juriss was a member.

The house has new owners who haven't yet furnished it, but they generously agreed to let us photograph it anyway. We called interior designer Katie Lockhart and asked her to help style the shoot with furniture from the period (thanks to Auckland's Art & Industry for supplying many of these beautiful pieces).

Simon Devitt took the photographs. In this one, you can see Juriss' clever manipulation of space, with the largely open-plan living area divided into zones with different levels and, therefore, entirely different moods. The dining area in this photo, for example, is a few steps down from a sitting zone, a gesture which makes the ceiling height appear to soar when you're at the table:

Tucked around the corner is a snug sitting area, separated from the open-plan space not by walls, but by the brick chimney. The ceiling plane ducks lower over this space, creating a much more intimate mood.

Overall, the house is a beautifully balanced composition of spaces with different moods and outlooks. Even though it was a relatively large house for its time, it is compact compared to the homes that now occupy coastal sites like it (the house is in the Auckland suburb of Glendowie), and has an efficient plan which delivers a great variety of interior and exterior experiences. One of our favourite rooms is the kitchen, with its continuation of the beautiful layering of timbers that characterises the rest of the house. Thankfully it too has been spared the indignity of an unsympathetic renovation.

More before and after

The house on the cover of our current issue is the old Thorndon Bowling Club in Wellington, for which architects Mary Daish and Liz Wallace designed a recent renovation. The building had already been turned into a residence in the 1990s, but Mary and Liz were called in to reconfigured the house for new owners, Tim and Fiona Arbuckle and their three children. The shots below best demonstrate the subtle but highly effective changes Liz and Mary introduced.


The 'Before' picture below shows the home's previous kitchen, which was located in a small space adjacent to a sundeck, while the room on the right contained a study.



In the renovation, the study was removed and the deck was filled in and replaced with a sunny area with window seats, as you can see in the image below. A new deck was created on the northwestern corner of the top floor, with stairs connecting to the garden below. The photographs are by Paul McCredie.


This view shows how the kitchen was designed to occupy the space formerly taken up by the study, which also allowed for more windows to let more light into the centre of this large room. The kitchen table and bench seats were custom-made for the space.

Sunrise

Here at HOME New Zealand, we were really sorry to hear that TV3 was shutting down Sunrise, our favourite breakfast TV show. This means, of course, that our weekly house feature won't be running. We want to thank the Sunrise team for their support and enthusiasm for good design, and to wish the team there well.

Michael O'Sullivan in Dwell

Michael O'Sullivan and Melissa Schollum's house in the Auckland suburb of Mangere Bridge - a finalist in last year's Home of the Year, the winner of a NZ Institute of Architects national award, and the winner of the inaugural BMW EfficientDynamics Sustainability Award - is featured in the latest issue of US-based Dwell magazine, with photographs by Patrick Reynolds. Congratulations from us to Michael on the international coverage of his great design.

Here's a link to the story on the Dwell site:

The Great Compression - Homes - Dwell

The '80s weren't so bad

We don't often get the opportunity to fly the flag for the 1980s, but in our latest issue we were pleased to. As many of you already know, the theme of this issue is 'Before & After'. The interesting thing about the renovation Julian Guthrie (of Godward Guthrie Architects) designed for this house on Auckland's Takapuna Beach was that in some ways, the original house didn't need too much altering. That was partly because it was designed in hte late 1980s by good architects in the first place: the Auckland firm of Mark-Brown, Fairhead, Sang and Carnachan. And it is partly because Julian's changes were so astute.

One of Julian's main interventions (apart from updating the kitchen and bathrooms) was the relocation of the stairway that connects the home's upper and lower levels. Here's what the hallway used to look like before the stairs were moved (the sloping site means you enter the home on the upper level, while the lower level connects with the garden and the path to the beach):

And below is one of Patrick Reynolds' photographs of it afterwards. Julian says moving the position of the stairs made the connection between the home's upper and lower levels much clearer, and also made it feel much easier to move between the two.

The transformation is particularly evident when viewed from the home's lower level. Here's the 'before' shot:

And here's the 'after'. Much better!