Taking elements of home life that you might have had in suburbia open
the doors and have some plants and a sense of kind
of greenery and nature in an elevated context I think is quite attractive.
I'm Hamish Monk one of the directors at Monk Mackenzie.
The site for this project is on Jervois Road in Herne Bay. Jervois Road is one
of the many arterial routes from Auckland CBD,
the road and the buildings are situated on a ridgeline it's afforded pretty spectacular
panoramic views all the way from the city back out to Waitākere's and over the Waitemata.
I'm Liam and this is Sophie we're from Artifact Property we're a
family-run business Liam's background is in development and mine is in architecture.
So it's North Face site sitting high on the ridgeline in Herne Bay, Herne
Bay is a leafy suburb with beautiful beaches, beautiful restaurants, cafes, design stores.
The brief evolved you know over a period of time through design workshops.
General premises that it would be a residential made mixed use development
I have an architectural background Liam has the development background so we were looking
for an architecture firm that would offer us a unique approach, it's a bit of a jigsaw puzzle,
it's only 500-square meters with 15 meters of street elevation and to do that in a kind of
interesting format with commercial at the base and quite luxury residential units above the
architecture for us is about contributing in a positive way to Auckland's built environment and
for us that's providing something that's simple and elegant and ages really well.
Eight apartments so when you look at the building from the street it was important that the lobby
had a sense of address to the street and it's obvious you kind of enter and it's framed by
two kind of solid blade walls a small 100 square meter commercial unit on the left two apartments
over three floors and then a penthouse suite on the top so the apartments have been cleverly
planned where you enter through the door and it's a really unique approach where we have this winter
garden deck which is quite unique so you feel quite open as soon as you enter an apartment
it's quite nice to have that long view from the point of entry, it also allowed us to push the
dining area further back into the plan instead of pushing it towards the view which is a slightly
different kind of spin on how you might typically plan an apartment we've kind of separated the
different functions so to the southern end there's the bedrooms and the private spaces.
One of the challenges I guess of having bedrooms to the street is the interface
between the public domain and the need for a private space so I guess the kind of screen
to the street helped us deal with that in a quite an available way varying degrees of
transparency and opacity depending on you know where you view it from so from the bedrooms and
you've got that direct sight line through the screen and it's quite open through the center,
you know you've got great views out to the context but when you're down on the street
the oblique view looking up is quite opaque and quite interesting to the north we've got the more
social spaces so the dining room, the living and the enclosed deck which is an amazing opportunity
to sit outside but also to be sheltered in winter for an apartment it really feels quite spacious.
The site as I mentioned is quite narrow so it's 15 meters and we've got two apartments per floor
and 33 odd meters kind of long and the longest part of the program I guess is the kitchen so it
made sense to align that on that kind of party wall condition where you can one look out to
the view on one side and then back through the winter garden on the other side it's something
quite attractive about having the functionality of a decent sized house and a well-speced kitchen.
So the material palette incorporates natural stone, natural oak and a lot of metal work,
we selected the dark bronze brass and that continues throughout the project we used it
through range hoods and through these custom Island benches that we built in
New Zealand with the local manufacturer, the natural stone we chose a ocean gray
marble the key with choosing a stone is you've got to live with it for a long
time so I think it's a balance between a lot of movement and the colour in it,
this ocean grey offered us that, I think it's a good balance between the natural and and the new.
The upstand, the island beach was a key feature of the space we didn't want it to be too flat
so a natural slab is really amazing it gives a lot of undulations and softness.
Part of the design of the kitchen was these vertical modular elements and repetition of
the baton handle so we needed to incorporate that with the appliances and that's why we selected the
vertical column fridge freezer, we could just have that 600 module continuous with the ovens
next to each other and wine fridge you don't really want the appliances to take prominence
that's where Fisher & Paykel appliances have worked really well here, they're really minimal
and clean and they work well with the dark stain of the oak and the aesthetics we wanted.
Might sound like cliche but you know it was a really good collaborative process
you know quite often, there's a lot of complexity in buildings, it's quite often a sweet spot
where you can tie things together and find a real nuanced abd poetic solution to a lot of complexity
we do feel extremely proud of this project, we've put a lot of heart and soul into this
project and to walk up the street and people looking and saying hey well that's really
really great project and all the positive comments we've had with feel really proud.