Objects from the Whole House Reuse project go on display (+VIDEO).

In September 2013, volunteers and a professional salvage crew painstakingly dismantled a Christchurch house at 19 Admirals Way that had been red-stickered for demolition. Each piece, removed by hand, was cleaned up and catalogued in order to represent the vast quantity of materials that comprise a home. Then came the design stage, in which artists and makers were invited to transform the materials into new objects.

This collection of objects will form an exhibition to run at Canterbury Museum. Visitors to the exhibit will see the work of master carver Brian Flintoff, as well as fine jewellery, furniture and toys, and many more works by some of the country’s finest designers and craftspeople. In August, around 200 art and objects will then be auctioned for charity.

“By taking one whole house and fully deconstructing it we could show firstly the huge scale of the materials and the volume of reusable material that was just inside one fairly standard house. And if we did that, we could then also engage a whole lot of thinking around those materials and what they were and their provenance and get creative minds thinking about those materials as valuable resources.” – Juliet Arnott, project founder and director of Rekindle, which facilitated the project.

From June 5– August 23, a final exhibition of the Whole House Reuse Project will be on display at the Canterbury Museum.

Inspiring LA architecture master visits New Zealand.

We’re bringing a big name in architecture to New Zealand in March, and you’ve got to come and hear her talk! Los Angeles-based architect Julie Eizenberg is the international member of our three-person Home of the Year 2015 jury and she’s going to be speaking in Auckland and in Christchurch. Here are five reasons to come along and be inspired:

1. She designs fantastic homes.

We love the Sobieski House in LA, designed as a series of pavilions for a family of four. It uses thrifty materials to create spaces that allow the way the family uses them to evolve over time. There’s also plenty of room for their art collection. Also, who wouldn’t want to live in the light, airy and just plain beautiful Hancock Lofts?

2. She has an Antipodean sensibility. 

Originally from Australia, Eizenberg moved to Los Angeles in 1979 and established Koning Eizenberg Architecture with fellow Australian Hank Koning, who is also her husband. The firm has gone on to win more than 90 awards and a reputation for rule-breaking, eco-friendly design in everything from private residences to libraries, hotels, museums and medium-density affordable and social housing. Says Eizenberg: “There’s something about coming from New Zealand or Australia that means you look at things with a fresh eye.”

3. She’s mastered the loose-limbed Los Angeles style. (And she’ll explain what she thinks that is). 

Eizenberg may be Australian, but she’s come to be regarded as quintessentially LA in her design approach. Her firm’s “taste for combining frugality and verve in the same project, and for juxtaposing serious architectural ideas with informality and references to Pop Art, flows directly out of a singularly LA tradition,” wrote Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, in an article on the firm. In 2012, Eizenberg won the American Institute of Architects Los Angeles Gold Medal in recognition of lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture.

4. She doesn’t just plan buildings, but thinks about the way cities are put together. 

She is a frequent advisor to the US Mayor’s Institute on City Design, lectures around the world, and comes to us fresh from a stint as a super-juror at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore.

5. She’s a pro at designing social and affordable housing. Architecture is accessible!

The theme of her talk is ‘Opportunity Hides in Plain Sight’. Some of her most-praised designs have involved the development of affordable homes, all with a strong eco-friendly emphasis.

Eizenberg hasn’t visited New Zealand since she was a kid, so we’re looking forward to showing her the work our architects have been creating. She’ll give lectures in Auckland (on March 2 at the Fisher & Paykel Auditorium at the University of Auckland) and Christchurch (March 4 at lecture theatre DL at CPIT). Tickets are $20 ($15 for subscribers and students) and you can buy them here. We look forward to seeing you there! (Architects get 10 CPD points for attending).

Our thanks, as always, to our Home of the Year sponsors, Altherm Window Systems, for making Julie Eizenberg’s visit possible.

Richard Naish of RTA Studio won the Home of the Year award in 2015 for the design of the house he built for himself and his family in the Auckland suburb of Grey Lynn. In fact, this wasn’t his first stab at designing such a home. The first home he designed for his family, just across Grey Lynn Park, was a finalist in our 2011 Home of the Year award. Here’s our story and video of the Naish-Hotere family’s first home from our Home of the Year 2011 coverage.

It is safe to assume that a large portion of New Zealanders have lived in a bungalow. It is less safe to assume that they enjoyed it. For awhile, these mass-produced bungalows had certain romanticism even though most people found them to be damp and cold.

Richard Naish and his wife Andrea Hotere had lived in plenty of these houses but hadn’t necessarily had their fill: when they purchased property in the Auckland suburb of Grey Lynn, where this new home now stands, they were prepared to keep the old bungalow that originally occupied it. “The initial plan was to gut the old bungalow and make it a large living area, then add a kids’ wing,” says Richard (the couple have three children, Jack, Alice, and Holly). Then they not only realized that the bungalow’s low ceiling height wouldn’t suit a large open-plan living space, but that it would cost only a bit more money to take full advantage of their double-size site by wrapping an all-new home around a generous courtyard. Confirmation they had made the right call came in the months that followed as Richard, co-founder of the Auckland architecture practice RTA Studio, stayed up nights in the bungalow’s study completing the working drawings for their new home. The house was so cold that winter that he wore his puffer jacket every night as he worked.

In these circumstances, you might expect a new home to be designed against the old bungalow’s inhospitability, but this is not the case. Sure, the new house Richard designed is warm and spatially generous in ways that most bungalows are not, but it is also a home that respectfully acknowledges its ancestry while confidently forging its own path. “I’m interested in demonstrating that you can create something that’s seriously modern and forward-looking that’s also contextual and sympathetic and right,” Richard says.

He already has a reputation for doing just this. RTA Studio is admired by contractors like Raleigh Roofing for designing buildings that manage to be modern and sensitive to the scale of their neighborhoods. It is a difficult tightrope to walk – something about the idea of fitting in suggests inoffensive blandness, something to which Richard does not aspire. “I’m always trying to make a subtle reference to context because if it’s overplayed it looks obvious and clumsy,” he says.

When it came to designing his own family home, one of his first steps was to treat Andrea as a client. She wrote “a fairly trusting brief,” she remembers. “I wanted something that felt tranquil and peaceful, with spaces for us all to be together and also to do our own things. And I wanted walls to hang paintings on rather than entirely windows.”

Richard’s design spreads the main wing of the house thinly along the edge of the site in the same relatively close proximity to the footpath as its neighbors, a gesture that, with a low fence made of recycled posts, maintains the rhythm and intimacy of the street. Yet there is no mistaking that this is a contemporary home: the roof pitch and its weatherboard cladding appear to be attempting to emulate the neighbors, but the long form and square windows look more like a child’s drawing of a house than the real thing. Screens made from laser-cut panels featuring an abstraction of a pattern borrowed from the fretwork of a nearby villa add unexpected decoration and a sense of intrigue about what might be going on inside.

Indeed, the house is hiding secrets from the street, including a flat-roofed volume further back on the site containing bedrooms for Jack, Alice and Holly that is connected to the main part of the home by a living area and TV room that also opens onto the courtyard. Just off the main living area is a new take on the outdoor room, a space with a fireplace that is open to the courtyard and veiled from the street by one of the aforementioned perforated panels, whose patterns cast beautiful shadows on the wall in the afternoon light. (Richard has travelled extensively in the Middle East, where he was fascinated by the contrast of busy city streets and cool, tranquil courtyards).

This game of revealing and concealing continues in the kitchen, which has an island bench in the open but most of its working space hidden behind a timber-clad wall. Richard confesses to being a messy cook, and appreciates the luxury of not having stacks of dishes visible from the dining table after the couple’s regular dinner parties. Upstairs is what Andrea calls a “luscious, grown-up retreat”: the couple’s bedroom and an adjacent mezzanine lounge separated from the living room downstairs, but not so much so that it feels isolated. Instead of a bungalow’s linear rooms-off-hall arrangement, this is a house of layers and complexity, a place designed for a family to grow into, somewhere to hold their collective memories without ever feeling cramped.

More highlights from the nationwide fest.

No, we don’t mean that Sam Smith, but our Sam Smith: our senior designer and stylist, who’s picked her favourite films from the Resene Architecture and Design Film Festival 2015 programme. The festival starts at Rialto Cinemas in Auckland (May 7-20) before moving to Wellington’s Embassy Theatre (May 28-June 10), Dunedin’s Rialto Cinemas (June 11-21) and Christchurch’s Academy Gold (June 25-July 08). Download the full programme from the link, and make your bookings soon! Here are Sam’s five favourites from the fest:

1. Architect of Dreams
Ian Athfield designed so many iconic and extraordinary buildings in New Zealand, and this 2008 documentary is an unmissable chance to celebrate his work and his stamp on New Zealand’s visual history. His voice and vision for alternative but appropriate cultural and social designs has intrigued even the most uncreative New Zealanders and has left a legacy for years to come.

2. Haus Tugendhat
The story of this iconic modernist house and its inhabitants promises to be an interesting and exciting journey set in the Czech Republic. I have a soft spot for early modernist work, particularly that of Miles van der Rohe, so it will be a treat to follow a house’s history that epitomises the movement’s values of social utopia and pure functionalism. The home was designed for Mies’ affluent and open-minded clients, the Tugendhats, and the film documents the role the house played in a time of turbulence, injustice and optimism through its inhabitants and users.

3. Gray Matters
As a woman who defined and influenced the modernist movement in the early 20^th Century through furniture and architectural design and competed with the most successful men of that era, I’m looking forward to this showcase of the life of a designer who never received the attention she was due in her ground-breaking career.

4. Bernardes
This promises to be an exciting look into the fascinating and entertaining life of Brazilian modernist architect Sergio Bernardes, known for his playboy and elite lifestyle, but also his thousands of elegant buildings designed throughout his career. I’m looking forward to finding out how his radical and controversial social ideas eventually led to his fall from grace. This film by his grandson documents his prolific life and investigates his eventual anonymity.

5. Slums: Cities of Tomorrow
As a sixth of the world’s population live in a slum or some sort of informal dwelling, the documentary will take us on a visual journey through the communities that are built and developed over a series of different continents, cities and cultures. This form of public housing is purely designed and built by its inhabitants with limited resources, taking inspiration from their cultures and landscapes surrounding them, while fighting the various governments that constantly try to eradicate the slums. I think it’ll be an interesting look into the lives and communities that are built in these dwellings. Also, it’s pertinent given that the common problem of housing shortages is set to continue to grow, even in our own backyard.

Red box. Green soul.

A homage to playfulness, this red cube on a Titirangi hillside is like a sculpture made with oversized Lego bricks. Its presence amid the greenery is surprising, yet the contrast somehow speaks of place – and almost everyone who visits is won over by its cheerful form and hue.

Slender, sky-seeking manuka and kanuka populate the section which, beyond the shared drive, drops into a valley. Keeping light-footed on the land was a priority. “We wanted to remove as little bush as possible,” explains architect Ken Crosson of Crosson Clarke Carnachan Architects. So the house was placed on poles at the flattish top of the site. “The builders worked with a 1.5-metre margin around the structure.”

Owners Blair and Janis Marler Harkness asked for a modest dwelling, a place to embrace their values of living with just enough – although Janis was still set on squeezing quite a few possessions into the small place. Janis is an artist who works from home while Blair, a journalist, broadcaster and communications advisor, trains and cycles into the city to work. To make the design cost-effective, the architects used a palette of affordable materials, coaxing from them a much richer experience.

Thank the design deities that CCCA’s original idea of a black box was dispensed with. Rescue came cloaked in a red coat, a corrugated-iron cladding, which effectively dodged the drab. Convincing the owners to take this colourful road less travelled was easy; convincing the council was a different matter. Crosson: “We argued that ‘barn red’ was part of the district plan on Waiheke Island, so why not here?”

To ensure interest within a restricted material palette on the straight-sided form, the house was made “dynamic in its skin”, an effect achieved by twisting the rippled sheets to create a pattern of vertical and horizontal lines. Crosson sketched the random design by hand for this patchwork of steel. “I had a sense of where we needed to get to. It was intuitive, a gut instinct,” he says.

Entry is via a timber boardwalk which extends to a small cantilevered platform – a compact space for coffee and contemplation. Inside, plenty of function was required within the 6 x 7-metre template over three floors. At the base are two bedrooms, one with built-in bunks for visiting grandkids. The only bathroom has a low-set louvre window – a vantage point for taking in the ground-level perspective of trees as they emerge from the earth. The laundry tucks into a cupboard alongside Janis’ studio, where a Perspex slider on the east-facing wall allows natural light into the small room.

Up a set of narrow stairs, the second storey is devoted to open-plan living, dining and general mayhem. The third level is a roof deck which hovers at tree-top height. All up, there are 90 square metres of interior action in the tight architectural programme.

What steel is to the outside of the home, pine is to the interior. Akin to a shipping crate, the ceiling, floor and walls are all lined in ply. This humble material fits with the homeowners’ philosophy of leaving any pretension on the mat laid out in front of the re-purposed, black-lacquered front door. This is a house brimming with art and personality. “I am a maximalist,” laughs Janis. “I can spoil any space you let me into.”

At the top of the stairwell, she has tacked the tongue-in-cheek New Year’s resolutions of her 18-year-old granddaughter and her friend. Scrawled on a paper towel, these shun the usual aspirations: “try liver” is one, “stop growing” another.

Within the main zone, the cross-section view takes in a tapestry of trunks. The challenge was to get enough light onto this level and, along with a band of black-steel windows, skylights on the northern edge draw sun into its heart. Janis is a fresh-air fiend; in summer she likes to hear the birds and so the double-glazed windows are open. Manuka blossoms drift in on the breeze.

Assorted memorabilia from the original Marler factory, the women’s fashion shoe manufacturer that is part of Janis’ family heritage, is jammed in amid an all-encompassing display of art. “Living here is not for the faint-hearted,” she says. There is method and order of a kind. The ironing board is a sore point – the only laundry item that is reluctantly allowed a presence on this level.

Rimu storage drawers that once housed cobblers’ tools are re-purposed on the kitchen cabinetry and a built-in TV unit. Some of the strips of timber were angled in a wedge to become handles on the door fronts. Green glass bottles march like troops along the kitchen window sill and are filled with pantry staples. “Dad sailed across the Tasman on Logan racing boats and used these for storage stacked on top of each other in the bilge,” says Janis.

On the western face of the home, Crosson designed a pop-out space with floor-to-ceiling glazing that breaks the regularity of the façade and is clad externally in plain solid steel.

The southern elevation, where the stairwell projects, has a glazed roof that follows the angle of the stair but continues way above the roof line. It’s a jaunty glass enclosure, an aesthetic curiosity that is vented to act as a heating-cooling chimney. The roof deck, under all-day sun, overlooks the leafy canopy – an eyrie for humans. In summer the grandchildren pitch a tent on its wooden surface: fledglings in the nest. To anchor it, they tie the guy ropes to “great big water bottles” Janis explains.

After many years of apartment living on the city fringe, the owners are thrilled to be reacquainted with the bush and bird life. They camped inside their home before it was finished, cooking on the wood-burner, listening to the dawn chorus from bed and laughing at the everyday spectacle of a whirling cat as it tried to catch cicadas. This connection with nature they describe as “priceless”. Red box. Green soul.

Editor Jeremy Hansen talks up our interiors special.

It’s that time again, people: our new issue hits newsstands Monday June 1 – which has the added bonus of being a public holiday, giving you hours more time to browse our pages on what is hopefully a relaxing day off for all of you. Here’s editor Jeremy Hansen to talk you through the highlights of the issue.

Our new issue celebrates great interiors, but it’s not at all about prescribing rules for creating a successful space. In fact, the lineup of homes in our new issue is incredibly diverse, moving from the large and rather splendid home on our cover by Julian Guthrie (above) to a petite, irresistible Shepherd’s Cottage on Canterbury’s Annandale Farm, recently restored by the architecture firm Pattersons (below). (The cottage is also available for holiday rentals at annandale.com).

The point of all this is that we don’t want to dictate how an interior should look, but show you the good things that can result when you work with what a building is telling you. That might sound a bit woo-woo, but hopefully you then see the TriBeCa loft (below) of New Zealander Grant Biggar, recently renovated to a design by New York-based New Zealand architect David Howell, and you’ll know what we mean. The building’s saying something like, I’m in downtown Manhattan and I’m feeling glamorous – and David’s design is responding perfectly to that, don’t you think?

More variety, as we move from the urban bustle of Manhattan a far less densely populated part of the world: the mountainous surrounds of Lake Wanaka, where Richard Naish (the designer of our 2015 Home of the Year) has designed a home of recycled native timbers and stone inspired by the landscape around it (below). The interior is a mix of sustainably harvested beech (the ceiling), local schist and recycled totara (the walls), and we think it’s beautiful.

So we’re showing you that great interiors can be created in spaces large and small. In this issue, we also introduce you to New Zealand graphic designer Nik Clifford and his partner, Jenny Miles. They’ve moved frequently in the past few years, from London to New Zealand and now to New York. We visit their rented Brooklyn apartment (below) to test their claim that it’s possible to create a memorable interior with little more than a couple of suitcases of possessions. Turns out, they’re right.

We’ve also got a special 24-page section focusing on kitchen and bathroom design, with advice from the designers of each of these spaces about their process. Bathrooms like this one (below), by Julian Guthrie make us love the idea of taking a long weekend soak with our favourite magazine (we’d take HOME, but all of us have read it at least five times before it goes to press and remain terrified of finding any errors once it arrives in the office, so we might have to choose a substitute).

And kitchens like this beauty by David Howell (below) make us feel like slow-cooking something delicious. We also like the way he’s created a social area around the island, cleverly demarcated by the large orange-lined lightshade by Francesco Rota above. We hope you find the kitchens in our special sections, and the rest of our new issue, similarly inspirational.

A roundup of top summer rentals.

You want to get away for the weekend. But your long-held dream of a holiday home of your own has yet to materialise. The good news is, there’s no need to complain about the fact that you don’t have your own bach, because it’s also possible to hire one for the holidays. This roundup features a few of our favourites from around the country that we know are available for rent – of course we can’t guarantee they’re all still available for peak-time summer bookings, but there’s also nothing like a late-summer break, don’t you think?

Oruawharo Cottage, Great Barrier Island

This two-bedroom hideaway on Great Barrier Island was designed by Tim Hay and Jeff Fearon of Fearon Hay, with interior architect Penny Hay working on the interiors. It’s cosy, simple and has a sensational view of Medlands Beach and the hills beyond. After the short flight (or longer ferry ride) to Great Barrier from Auckland, you really will feel a million miles from everything while staying here.

Book Oruawharo Cottage here.

First Light House, Waimarama, Hawke’s Bay

Originally designed by students from the School of Architecture at Victoria University of Wellington for the 2011 Solar Decathlon in Washington, DC, the First Light House has since made a triumphant return home, being sold to a couple who have relocated it to a magnificent site above Hawke’s Bay’s Waimarama Beach. So if you’re feeling like a fabulously eco-friendly escape (the home generates all its own electricity, and returns surplus to the grid), we highly recommend you book it right away.

Book First Light House here.

Otama House, Coromandel
This dream bach in the Coromandel was designed by New York–based architect David Berridge as somewhere to come back to when he visits New Zealand. The rest of the year, this beautiful house with ocean vistas and afternoon sun is available for holiday rentals.
Book the Otama House here.

Millar Road cottages, Hawkes Bay
There are two cottages at Hawkes Bay’s Millar Road (near Havelock North), both designed in 2002 by Nick Bevin of Wellington’s Bevin + Slessor to evoke memories of New Zealand river and lakeside baches of the 1950s and 1960s with their relaxed layouts and simple forms. Inside is a great range of New Zealand furnishings and art, and it’s just a short trip from the cottages to vineyards including Craggy Range, Black Barn and Clearview Estate. There’s also a swimming pool on site.
Book Millar Road cottages here.

Lake Waikaremoana cabins, Urewera National Park
The Department of Conservation calls these charmingly modest cabins “chalets”, but let’s not quibble about the details. Designed in 1978 by one of the country’s most revered architects, the late John Scott, the corrugated-iron cabins have compact open-plan interiors and are just a minute’s walk from the shore of the beautiful lake and the many walking tracks of the Urewera National Park. Just up the road is the (currently mothballed) Aniwaniwa Visitor & Information Centre, also designed by Scott.
Book Lake Waikaremoana cabins here.

The Cellar Master’s Cottage, Hawke’s Bay
Surrounded by vines and only a limestone-paved path away from Craggy Range’s Giants Winery, The Cellar Master’s Cottage, designed by John Blair, is a wine-lover’s oasis tucked under Te Mata Peak. The set-up of the two-bedroom cottage suggests that cooking is an option, but we might also suggest savouring the local vintages at the vineyard’s Terroir restaurant, just a short stumble away.
Book The Cellar Master’s Cottage here.

Bay of Many Coves, Marlborough Sounds
The Bay of Many Coves is technically a resort, but one made up of a number of small, jewel-like baches designed by Marshall Cook of Cook, Sargisson, Tarrant & Pirie. The result is a village of self-contained dwellings congregated unobtrusively on a hillside overlooking Queen Charlotte Sound. Each unit has its own kitchen, but you might be more tempted by the restaurant beside the jetty or one of the resort’s two cafés.
Book Bay of Many Coves here.

Ahu Ahu Villas, New Plymouth
Designed by Taranaki’s favourite architects, Boon Bhaskar Goldsmith, using hardwood wharf piles, century-old French clay tiles, lattice windows and other recycled items, the Ahu Ahu Villas are actually much less ramshackle than they sound. In fact, these strong and charming buildings are the perfect fit for a magnificent location on a cliff looking back towards Oakura Beach. There’s no better spot from which to enjoy the wild west coast.
Book Ahu Ahu Villas here.

The Gray Bach, Ngawi, Cape Palliser
The best way to face the southerlies that pummel Ngawi, the small fishing village near Cape Palliser (an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Wellington), is in a building made of concrete, which is precisely what Studio Pacific Architects’ Evzen Novak created with this very modern take on the seaside cottage. The furniture inside doesn’t quite match the promise of the exterior, but the one-bedroom bach has a log fire, a generous kitchen, and huge windows to watch the sea through, rain or shine.
Book The Gray Bach here.

We will update this list as new houses become available for bookings, so check back next time you’re planning an escape from the city.

Small footprint, big impact.

For the past month, we asked you to revisit two decades worth of Home of the Year winners andvote for your favourite – no easy task. Each house has its fans, but there was a clear winner with 32 per cent of the votes: Cheshire Architects’ Eyrie, twin cabins on the Kaipara Harbour. You told us they were “great little spaces” and, naturally, we agree.

With a collective footprint of just 28 square metres these tiny cabins won you over, just as they won over the jury in 2014 to take out the top spot of Home of the Year. Read more about these austere, beautiful and intriguing buildings here.

Congratulations to Nat and the Cheshire Architects team on another win for this fantastic design. And congratulations to Geordie Shaw who won the CSYS Tall floor lamp (pictured at left) by Jake Dyson from ECC for voting in the People’s Choice award.

Dreaming up unforgettable homes.

Take a look inside the studios where Home of the Year winning houses are first dreamed up. Cheshire Architects, whose twin cabins on the Kaipara Harbour won Home of the Year in 2014 and the People’s Choice award this year; Fearon Hay, whose holiday home won Home of the Year in 2000, and Stevens Lawson, a studio with four Home of the Year wins to its name.