Cementing History

Words Melinda Williams
Photography Patrick Reynolds

It’s taken more than 30 years, but this monolithic house in Auckland has been honoured with New Zealand’s highest architectural award.

“This is the house that Jack built,” runs the old nursery rhyme. But rarely, if ever, is an architectural story so simple. In this case, that of a monumental home in concrete first built in 1973, this is the house that Ron and Phil and Jeff and Tim, and many, many others over the house’s 34-year history, built. Through at least four sets of owners and as many serious alterations, renovations and restorations, the living spaces have been moved in and out, expanded and filled in, stripped and restored. And, after all this, from tinkering to full-scale gutting, this year the house was declared the winner of New Zealand’s Supreme architectural award by the New Zealand Institute of Architects.

It was destined to be an unusual and significant project right from the start. Architect Ron Sang was commissioned by the property’s first owner, Phil Sargent, to create a house using concrete as the primary material. Sargent, who headed a construction company, planned to use his own company to construct the house, and was keen to use what was then mainly an industrial material. “The fact that we were building in concrete meant that we were able to do these very large cantilevered balconies,” remembers Sang. “But also because it was concrete, we had to make it interesting.”

Sang was partly inspired in his design for the three-storey house by the Sydney home of the late Australian architect Harry Seidler. Working to the client’s brief for a “rugged” house, he took advantage of the aggressive nature of concrete, designing a plan based on strong horizontal lines and slim vertical columns. To add texture to the two-storey staircase well, he created corrugated concrete panels, by pouring the concrete into corrugated iron boxes, and then knocking the edges off to soften the effect a little. The result, as described by the New Zealand Home Journal at the time, was a house that was “tall, strong and beautiful – a series of concrete planes – the height balanced by jutting glass-fronted balconies and horizontal concrete beams.”

Thirty years later, a new set of owners approached architectural partnership Fearon Hay, looking to restructure the house to meet their needs. “Right from the start they told us that they had a great piece of New Zealand architecture that they believed had serious iconic value but the family didn’t fit into the house,” recalls Fearon. “They wanted to reinvent it for their needs.” With a large family, the new owners wanted to expand the house’s small bedrooms and create areas of separation for the parents and the children. “What we had to do was find out what was in the original building structure that was essential,” says Fearon. Although the house rests on an enormous, almost half-acre section, the architects were keen to retain the feeling that the house was sitting in a park. “We didn’t want to over-occupy the site and engulf the original building,” Fearon explains. “Eventually we came around to the approach that was built, which was to extend and reformat the building within the main residence, demolish the single-storey garaging and service area at the front of the house and extend the house over both levels to the south and southwest.” The north face was unmodified in terms of the structure, apart from a new balcony leading out from the kitchen and dining room.

After talking with Sang and looking over the original plans, Fearon and Hay concluded the most important idea to retain was the roof canopy from which the three-storey house seemed to be suspended. “When you take away all of the internal walls, window joinery, cabinetry and furniture of the existing building you’re left with a series of two-to-three storey concrete sheer walls, arranged in a Cartesian configuration, so they slide north-south and east-west, past each other,” says Fearon. “The way that the essential concrete walls are arranged is quite dynamic. It’s these very elegantly spaced blades, beams and columns, and you sort of live around. The house steps all over the place as it pushes out towards various rooms. And it’s that stepping and staggering that allowed us to find a lot of places to grab more space.”