In a project in suburban Auckland, Crosson Architects looks backwards to create a bespoke house with a great sense of humour.
Bridges, a turret, round windows that pivot like portals to another realm — they’re not typically found in suburban architecture. However, on a street in Point Chevalier, Tāmaki Makaurau, they’re part of a family home designed as a playground for both children and adults.
The house, created by Crosson Architects, is ambitious in its aesthetic but modest in its execution; a dwelling purpose built for a young family with a well-developed sense of whimsy.
The clients wanted a house to replace the rundown 1980s dwelling on the site. It couldn’t be too expensive, and they wanted something a little different from the vernacular of the villas and 1920s–1940s homes on their street. Oh, and they wanted a turret for their two boys, so that they could imagine themselves as medieval kings as they hung out in their first-floor lookout, surveying their suburban domain.
Project architect Sam Caradus was very happy to be tasked with creating a building that would stand out on the street thanks to its playfulness, but he also wanted to reference the suburban context. Old photos of the neighbourhood, the zoo, and MOTAT were pored over by Sam and the Crosson team. Slowly but surely a distinctive floorplan took shape that was informed by the client’s wishes and the local environs.
“Interesting is a good place to start in describing it,” Sam says of the design. “Interesting was the ambition. It had to be playful and dynamic, too.
The underlying plan that sits behind all of that interestingness is a rational one that has evolved as a response to the site, so there’s a huge amount of rigour underneath the form and spaces.”
At a functional level, the home is a simple two-storeyed, four-bedroomed dwelling, with a large open-plan kitchen and living area no different from many contemporary builds. It’s the flourishes that are unexpected. They include that turret on one side of the house. Its profile, fat and solid, clad in black standing seam roofing, was inspired by a metal drum lying on the ground in a vintage photo of MOTAT. A curved wall on the other side of the façade and two round windows were inspired by aerial shots of the zoo showing the round enclosures the animals lived in back in the day. An asymmetrical, folded-down edge to the roofline is an intentional play on the height-to-boundary ratio that gives the exterior a sculptural quality, and an irregular shape to a bedroom and a bathroom inside.
Such quirks “found their way in in curious ways,” says Sam.
The materiality is often unexpected, too. Instead of weatherboards or board and batten, the exterior is plastered on the lower level, while the upper storey is clad in porcelain tiles more often seen in bathrooms. The sheets of white tiles glisten in the sun, giving the house a shimmery, reflective quality and, like the black joinery, fit the project’s restricted colour palette of black, white, grey, and timber.
Inside, two concrete walls poured in situ have been left raw as a foil to the surrounding GIB walls. The bridges and walkways that connect the bedrooms on the first floor were specified in powder-coated black metal for impact; in lieu of a hallway, they create a double-height void in the entranceway and the middle of the living area.
The living space is north-easterly and private, with a low key kitchen. A large, round timber portal that swivels in the middle of one concrete feature wall mirrors the circular windows at the front of the dwelling. All of the bedrooms have a mossy-green carpet, while downstairs the round room is carpeted in burnt orange.
“The combination of all of these moments means that, throughout the entirety of the house, there are dynamic things happening,” explains Sam. “The success of this project comes down to lots of interesting moments that all come together.”
It’s an easy, breezy, whimsical house, but it wasn’t a straightforward build. The project took five years to complete. Throughout, “there was energy, ambition, trust, and openness,” Sam says. “Very few clients get on board like that.”
Architecture: Crosson Architects
Build: Lindesay Construction
Words: Kirsten Matthew
Images: Simon Devitt
