There's a really strong feeling and sense when you're in the house of
being in a private sanctuary and part of that is the light and the gardens and the
outlooks are all really protected and focused. My name is Piers Kay, I'm an architect and this
is my own home the Skelton Studio house. The house is located in Belmont on the North Shore
in Auckland and it's in a quiet residential area. It was built in 1954 for a couple and
a young child. When we first looked at the house we didn't realise that it was an original group
architect's house but we could tell it was of that era, it had been altered quite a bit,
the garden was really overgrown but a really big part of the house and a lot of the native
timbers and kind of exposed surfaces were still really intact so while a lot of the
windows were removed and a lot of the natural light was taken out you could see it had really
strong bones and it needed just an edit to kind of bring it back to what it used to be.
The brief we gave ourselves was to respect the original house,
we really loved it and for a while we thought we would keep it pure and never change it
but we decided at some point to make the spaces slightly more usable for us and slightly bigger.
In terms of the layout, you arrive from the street and encounter the new extension which
is massed as a long, low rectangle to the street and as you move around the side courtyards start to
open up and eventually you arrive at the main courtyard and the existing house. Once inside
is the open living and dining spaces and studio spaces and then as you move around the space to
the rear of the site we have our bathroom that is set inside the plan and then it descends down into
our bedroom. Within the existing house it was quite clear about what to keep and what to edit
and remove, a lot of it was restoration work so we were restoring timbers that had been painted
or restoring windows that had been removed. We were lucky enough that the original drawings
were kept on archive at Auckland University that showed what it looked like when it was completed
so a lot of the work we did to the house was about understanding what it should look like
peeling back some of the layers that had been added to it and exposing it in its best light.
In terms of our work and our interventions we pushed a new space out on the street side,
It's a kind of offset 8x4 rectangle that connects to the back of our scullery and kitchen,
part of the work that we were interested in doing was creating a kitchen that had a sense
of front of house and back of house, in order to achieve those spaces we started talking to
Fisher & Paykel about what appliances would work in those various zones. We knew we wanted cooking
as part of our kitchen table and more living and opening experience but we wanted it to be
very subtle and so part of that was the way we designed the cabinetry that it sits into,
they feel more like bits of furniture than kitchen cabinetry they have plastered fronts
and raw stone edges and it was also the selection of the cooktop, there's no overhead extraction so
it's quite visually clean and it's all set flush within the stone and very discreet.
For the scullery it was all about really clever use of space and integration even though it's not
front and centre within the house we still wanted it to be really clean and visually really clean,
it's a small space so visual clutter was something we wanted to avoid and so working
with Fisher & Paykel all the appliances are really well integrated and covered with the
same tone of cabinetry front that we use throughout the house. It's also a space
where we have our laundry and we used a combined washing machine and drying machine to get the
most spatially efficient layout we could. There's a lot of design freedom when using
these appliances and the integration means that you can compose the spaces really as you want.
Another thing that we were interested in doing was modernising the bathroom, it was my wife and
I living here by ourselves and so we wanted a bathroom that felt like a sanctuary. I was
interested in really tactile materials, natural materials but I wanted the material palette to
be very tonal or as tonal as it could be and so we put down new French oak floors,
the new windows and the new part of the house are all Cedar to match the original. There's a
plaster colour in the paint and cabinetry services and then we chose a stone that's
used throughout the kitchen and bathroom it's the same stone, that's really soft it's almost
concrete in texture and quite interested in that tonal consistency but with textural variation/
What was really clear to us about the house originally was the amount of glass
and the connection with the outside and the light that that enables and
so we worked with the landscape architect Jared Lockhart in designing the landscape,
we wanted everything to be natives and seasonal colour and trees that blurred
the boundaries. I think our favourite part about the project is the house's connection
with the landscape and the light and the sense of being in a really calm and tranquil space.