Outside In

Words Melinda Williams
Styling Danielle Bates
Photography Simon Devitt

Black and white, indoors and outdoors, old and new – a designer plays with opposites in this new luxury townhouse.

Although most Kiwis have given up on the 1950s quarter-acre dream, we still cling to the hope that living in the suburbs means having enough space that we don’t have to be intimately acquainted with the details of our neighbours’ everyday lives. Being able to wave over the fence is fine; being able to stare into their bathroom window as they brush their teeth in the morning is not. And as city-fringe suburbs fill in wherever there’s a piece of land big enough to squeeze a house on, preserving privacy is becoming increasingly difficult.

Designer David Ponting took on that challenge when he was asked to design two new houses on a site in Herne Bay, Auckland. Although he didn’t have a strict brief of specifications the houses should conform to, the site demanded some lateral thinking to avoid uncomfortably close neighbourly relations. To solve it, and create a unifying theme between the two houses, Ponting played with ideas of reversal and opposition. Standing on the driveway between the two buildings, he points out how the lower floor of one is rendered predominantly in white, and the upstairs in black, and how the other reverses the colours. The house on the left, he says, was designed to have a more feminine feel, while the house on the right reflects a more masculine sensibility. “When I was given the brief, there was no particular client in mind, so I was able to create a house that I might want to live in myself,” he says.

From the outside, the ‘masculine’ house is a closed book, with high, blank walls, a wide, smooth panel of a front door and only one block of small windows visible on the second floor. A huge oak tree stands sentry to one side of the door. Standing on the doorstep, you have no idea of what might be contained within. As the wide door swings open, a surprisingly spacious hallway is revealed: soaring black anthra-zinc panels and a stairway rising to the left towards a double-height atrium and a lounge overlooking a lap pool and vivid aqua feature wall ahead. “You come from outside the enclosure, where there’s a real sense of being ‘outside’ and the moment you pass through the threshold, it’s a very dramatic experience and hopefully you just go, ‘Wow!’ and understand why it’s special to be in here,” says Ponting.

The house is designed with what Ponting calls a “black shed” at ground level, which houses the garage. Above, a white box sits on top, and interlinks with the black box on the interior. To the right, a glassed pavilion space surrounded by a slim garden and courtyard walls houses the main living areas. “The house is a garden courtyard, where the ‘fences’ work as the walls of the house,” Ponting explains. “The idea is that you experience the outside of the house; the courtyard walls become the exterior walls of the house.” Ponting worked with a landscaping company Second Nature to create a simple but dramatic garden that sandwiched between the floor-to-ceiling glass walls of the kitchen/dining space, and the high, white courtyard walls that provide the house’s privacy. “There wasn’t going to be anything beyond the perimeter of the site to treat as a positive, so we created an environment that creates a sense of expansion within the property,” he says. “The outer walls are as far away as they can be – that was the start of expanding the space, and then we layered the space inwards, so you’ve got the layer of white, then the layer of planting, then the layer of the floor and rooms, as things move into the middle. The kitchen is the middle of the property.”

The kitchen island, designed by Ponting in conjunction with Morgan Cronin Kitchens, was envisaged as a piece of furniture rather than a ‘room’. Smooth and white, with concealed drawers and cupboards, it seems to float a couple of inches above the floor. “I designed the layout and the form of the space, then Morgan and I talked through the details and he went away and really refined the details to another level again. It’s that extra level of polish that he puts into it that makes his kitchens so sexy. We’ve worked on three projects together now and I really look forward to the next one.”

The pared-back look of the house is partially a response to the other townhouse Ponting worked on at the same time. “This house is a step away from something else that had been done as much as it is something in its own right. I really wanted this to feel simple; the other house is more complex, more textured, more organic. Here there’s sort of a frictionless quality to the objects that you pass by. You just drift past everything.” That simplicity, and the minimal palette, makes the pop of colour from the aqua pool wall even more arresting. “That was really important. It’s super-dull if a house has no noticeable colour texture. You’ve got to have it somewhere. I saw it as a sculptural object that adds a sense of depth to the outlook.”

Depth was important in many ways. The anthra-zinc wall panels, for example, were chosen in charcoal instead of the usual lead colour because it had a grained effect, almost like a wood panel. “There’s more of an ability to look into it, whereas the lighter colours have more of a feel of being a ‘surface’. It doesn’t look as machine-made as it actually is. It could overpower a room really easily but because it does have a softness on the eye, it’s a dark but friendly object.”

Upstairs, above the black box, the stairwell opens up into a gallery space that could be used as a children’s play area or a library. Light pours in from skylights in the ceiling. “One of the really important aspects of a site with a lack of privacy is to have as few windows on the outside as possible, and lots of ‘holes’ in the roof. That gives plenty of light and a sense of space, and it’s really central to the enjoyment of this atrium,” says Ponting. At the front end of the house, two bedrooms look out at the big oak tree at the front of the house through paneled windows. “These rooms get the tree as part of their experience, as opposed to the neighbours’ houses,” he says. “It’s a very compressed environment. It wasn’t about putting windows everywhere. It was about making sure that there was sun, light and a filtered outlook, but then leaving a box, leaving it to read as a strong box without too many incisions in it.” At the other end is the master suite, the only room in the house with a view unimpeded by neighbours, looking out over a city-owned organic garden collective, a sea of banana palms and a sliver of Cox’s Bay.

Describing the house as essentially “a high-value apartment on a section” Ponting says he’s pleased with the way his play on opposite’s has worked out. “It’s a masculine house and the other house is very feminine, so it’s the idea of the yin/yang, the black and the white, and the white and the black. I wanted the rooms to feel strong, to have a sense of security about them, so it feels relaxing to be there. And although people aren’t used to walls that are 2.7 metres high, there’s no sense of claustrophobia, because the space is expansive.”