Immaculate Correction

Words Melinda Williams
Photography Carlo van de Roer
Styling Gabrielle Mirkin

Fast cars, big sunglasses and cocktails by the pool – this restored Auckland house captures the glamour of the 1980s with new millennium style.

Everything was big in the ‘80s. Hair was teased, skirts ballooned, wallets were stuffed with cash, muscles bulged and shoulder pads were huge. And if you couldn’t make something bigger, you just made it flashier. And when Mark Lindale bought this 1980s house in Herne Bay, it was obvious that previous owners had followed that dictate to the nth degree.

Owned at one time by the Sultan of Brunei’s brother and completely redecorated in anticipation of his visit that never eventuated, the house was a tribute to maximalist flashiness and conspicuous consumerism. Brass trim, indoor fountains, pinky-peach carpet, red-tiled bathrooms and a bath shaped like a pair of giant swan wings were just a few of the wonders (horrors?) that Lindale got as part of the package when he bought the house three and a half years ago. A rambling structure, with five bedrooms, five bathrooms, three expansive living areas, a generous foyer, gym and even a full indoor squash court, it was ripe for some serious modernisation.

Originally, Lindale planned to divide the building into two townhouses, but after living in it for a while, he started to see the potential hiding under the layers of bling, and decided to renovate it instead. To help, he turned to interior designer Natalie Boyle and architects Lance Herbst and Nicky Meiring. All three admit to some initial horror at the house’s interiors. “It was amazingly tacky,” laughs Herbst. “Inside the house was just all wrong because it had been worked over a couple of times. The time that it was done for the Sultan of Brunei’s brother was when all the brass and the gold and the gaudy colours came in, so it was really pretty bad. And then it was overlaid with terracotta on the decks, which was obviously from a previous incarnation. All in all, there were a lot of jarring languages.”

Initially the planned scale of the renovation was relatively tame – just the kitchen, carpets and curtains – but a more fundamental disaster was uncovered when the walls were torn out in preparation for the new kitchen. “When we opened up the walls, we found some pretty serious ingress of water,” says Herbst. “That was a big shock. The house was actually quite shoddily put together. The client just wanted to do a bit of refurb but there was some major structural and waterproofing work that had to happen first.”

With the decision made to take on a full-scale renovation, Herbst and Meiring decided not to attempt to disguise the house’s ‘80s heritage, but instead to play it up, and turn it into something that Don Johnson would have been proud to live in during his Miami Vice years. “Primarily, we were playing into the positive aspects of what was already here. Because there were some very good bones and it was a case of distilling out of that what the good stuff was,” Herbst explains. “Instead of trying to overlay something on it again, we tried to strip it back and find the right language and materials. And achieve consistency, which was something that it lacked because it had been worked over so often. It was really just an opportunity to give it what it was due.”

Boyle says one of the first decisions made was to keep the colour palette very neutral. “We tried to keep everything kind of black, white and chrome. Mark’s existing art collection was quite amazing, so we really wanted to create big blank spaces that would showcase the pieces. We didn’t want to create a cluttered or colourful environment.” The kitchen, which was already underway when the decision was made to extend the renovations, was the starting point. The cabinetry, by Poliform from Studio Italia, was kept to simple black, and the “awful, overlaid, beachy flooring” was replaced with white-stained American oak. “We spent a long time getting the right colour. CTC Flooring probably did about 20 samples for us before we got it right.” The kitchen was also where the choice was made to bring back a 1980s staple – glass bricks. “That was a big take-a-breath decision,” admits Herbst. “But they actually worked very well. In the original house, there were lots of curves, but all the windows were straight, so when we replaced them with glass blocks, we were able to follow the lines of the curves.”

The next point of focus was what Boyle refers to as “the boys’ room” downstairs: a games room complete with pool and poker tables. “We were doing a lot of work with Poliform so we got them to make a huge custom seating piece, but when it arrived and we put it in the space it was actually really overpowering so we had to shuffle some things around. Paul Izzard designed the seating for the poker table. We wanted some comfortable and relaxed booth seating that didn’t look too much like it was something out of a bar – we wanted something that looked like it was made for the space.”

The boys’ room opens out to the foyer, which underwent a dramatic makeover. “Originally the planters in here were all fountains, and there was the most overpowering smell of chlorine as soon as you walked in the door,” says Meiring. “They had lots of chrome fountain spikes, so it could actually be quite dangerous too if someone got drunk and fell in.” Various ideas were toyed with for the area, including a sculpture and a centralized meeting area, but in the end, Boyle spotted the two Mark (??) chairs in a catalogue. “I knew that they’d be the only two seats that would look really magnificent there.” The enormous Lolli e Memmoli chandelier came from ECC Lighting & Living. “I’d seen the chandeliers there so I went in and how much this one was. They gave me a price so I rang back the next day and said, ‘Yes, we want it,’ but they’d sold it that afternoon! So we had to go through the rigmarole of having one hand-made in Italy and waiting five or six months for it to be sent down.”

From the foyer, a double staircase winds up to what used to be the dining room but has been transformed into a reading room. Mark had a big wooden bookcase that had been made by Apartmento, and this was really the only place for it, so he had a curved shelf made to match by cabinet-maker Ray Mark,” says Boyle. “There’s not a lot of natural wood in the house, so putting the Naguchi table in, which had a nice retro feel and nice curves, it created a softer feel. It’s probably the softest area in the house, and it’s got lovely light as well.” The soft feel is enhanced by the thick, deep green-black carpets that were hand knotted in India.

The upstairs balcony looks out over the pool, garden and barbecue areas, the only parts of the house that were essentially untouched, apart from the installation of lighting and sound systems. The garden design was done by Ted Smyth, who is really very well known,” says Herbst. “The rumour goes that they spent a million dollars on the landscaping when it was first built – and a million dollars was worth a bit more in those days!” Boyle adds. All the joinery around the windows and sliding doors to the balcony was replaced, and the outside of the house was replastered to give it a more modern look.

“The reason it has all worked is that we actually unhinged the house and put it back together,” says Herbst “The way the spaces interrelated, there was kind of an awkwardness about it, and it’s the connections between things that we’ve sorted out that has been the most successful.” And although the original house owed a debt more to Miami Vice than anything, these days it has a far sharper look. “It’s actually a modernist and a post-modern crossover. The balustrades and all kinds of elements in this building are actually quite [Richard] Meier-esque,” muses Herbst.