Until recently, this 1960s home sat squarely at the centre of a generous site in the Auckland suburb of St Heliers. Privacy was scarce, and the arrival was framed with little more than a pair of exposed car parks — an arrangement that left the home visually adrift.
The façade — clinker brick below and timber above — spoke clearly of the home’s era. Inside, a partial renovation had nudged it towards the present, but the transformation felt unresolved. It was at this stage that Matter Architects was engaged to deliver the project’s final phase — a thoughtful edit rather than a complete rewrite.
Key to the brief: a defined sense of arrival, greater privacy, and a stronger relationship between house and landscape.
The solution began with a new stand-alone structure housing a garage and pool house. Positioned along the northern boundary, this acts as a visual bookend — a deliberate delineation between public and private, and the starting point for a sequence of moments that now define this overtly contemporary family home.
Clad in vertical timber, the garage is designed for both cars and boats, its concealed dual doors opening to the street on one side and the lawn on the other. Modest in form and intention, it avoids distraction.
“It’s a lovely but simple form — you could almost describe it as a Monopoly house,” says architect Jonathan Smith. “We didn’t want it to take away from the suburban sea views.”
Those views are expansive, stretching north to Rangitoto and west to the city skyline — the Sky Tower framed in the distance.
Between the house and the pool house, a long linear pool now traces the length of the site, edged with a white aluminium slat fence that gently separates pool from lawn without obscuring the view between.
“We wanted to reuse as much as possible while introducing a series of spaces that would grow with the clients’ young family,” Jon says.
Existing deck joists were repurposed to create a new architectural face — a modernist gesture of vertical screening and a louvred roof, framed by a rectilinear form that reaches towards the pool and the view beyond. The new deck significantly expands the upper-level living area, while, beneath it, a second covered space opens to the pool on one side and the lawn on the other.
“It’s a series of thresholds. A cobbled path leads from the street, transitioning visitors from public to private — past planting, alongside the pool, and up into the main living spaces, where you look back across the water to the pool house. There’s a kind of circularity to it — it’s quite magical; a new stair leads you down again, completing the loop,” the architect explains.
The language of verticality repeats throughout — in the cladding of the garage and pool house, the aluminium fencing, and the screening of the main home.
“There’s a sense of layering to it,” Jon says. “At the same time, it gives you privacy and control over light.”
The thresholds blur, and the connections between architecture, garden, and sea quickly form a single, cohesive voice. It is, as its name suggests, a series of fortunate events.
Architecture: Matter Architects
Images: Simon Devitt
