Social Work

_Words Bill McKay
Photography Simon Devitt_

Marshall Cook’s new house in Ponsonby – like his old one in Parnell – reveals design mastery and an understanding of modern family dynamics.

Cars don’t exist, children should be seen but not heard and women belong in the kitchen at the back of the house. Sunlight is not important. What counts is the façade a house presents to the public. Who’d hold to these nostrums today? But they do seem to be implicit in Auckland’s heritage controls, which are aimed at preserving rows of villas in the inner suburbs. Because you can’t preserve the architecture without endorsing the values behind it, can you? Council expectations are that even a new house in the Residential 1 area will mimic the forms and features of the existing housing stock, even if that mode of living is way out of date. And they even offer some very nice guidelines and a few helpful committees, too.

Franklin Road is one of the most interesting streets in Auckland, a cross section through the city’s architectural and social history. Houses range from little workmen’s cottages at the foggy bottom through boarding houses and respectable villas half way up, then a couple of turreted mansions on top of the sunny ridge. To this ensemble architect Marshall Cook of Cook Sargisson Tarrant and Pirie has added an exemplar of how Aucklanders might live in the inner city. His house respects the scale and texture of its neighbours but is unabashedly new – not for the sake of looking new but because the architect has asked – and answered – the question, ‘What is a house for a twenty-first century family like?’
Well, it doesn’t look like a villa, for a start. Marshall Cook’s architecture at first glance can seem fairly well mannered compared to the architectural gymnastics of others, but this appearance masks deep attention to one of the fundamental questions addressed by good domestic architecture: how can the design of a family house contribute to sustaining and enriching social relationships? As Marshall and his wife Prue talk about this place they come back again and again to the central issue of how the house
fits family life.
The bravest thing about this house is the way it resists the real estate agents’ lowest common denominator of maximum bathrooms, maximum bedrooms and maximum resale value to come up with a much more flexible plan and far more possibilities for living. (Ironically, this very flexibility may well render the house more saleable, if the time comes.) The heart of the place is a large sunny room with kitchen and table, which opens up on one side to a big courtyard that expands the space of the house in good Auckland fashion. This pavilion is bracketed by a two-storey tower at each end. It’s not unlike a little village, with the towers as winding retreats forming private spaces that overlook a living area akin to a public square. The Cooks are great entertainers – Marshall’s hospitality is rivalled only by his desire for a good old debate around the dinner table.
Through doors at the far end of the convivial central space, at the quiet end away from the street, is a snug little book-lined space and stairs to the main bedroom above. Above the garage at the opposite end – the street end – is a little enclave of spaces that can be opened up or closed off in various permutations to house combinations of visitors such as grandkids and guests. This space isn’t the usual musty little guest room at the sunless end of the house; on the contrary, it is one of the sunniest spots in the house and, with its combination of bed and living spaces, could be kids’ wing, elderly parents’ quarters or office and guest room. (These days kids don’t leave home until they’re 30 and when they do one of your debilitated parents moves in.)

Architects are fond of coming up with concrete solutions to their clients’ briefs, but few house plans accept change is constant, or that families might have a need for flexibility over several decades. What makes the plan of this house work so well is the layering of privacy, through sliding doors and internal windows, that allows the place to be set up for any combination of visitors without everyone feeling as though they’re camped on top of each other. The central living space and kitchen, however, acts as a gathering spot that, for example, draws teens from their introspective lairs into family life. Marshall Cook describes both this house and his former family home (see page 116) as explorations into the spatial arrangement of the life of the contemporary family, rather than designs for the historical or ideal one.
Ironically, though, the Cook House has a couple of things in common with the old-fashioned villas it rejects. What makes the villa so good, and what has ensured its survival, isn’t the pretty, frilly façade that Council is intent on protecting, but the plan that allows us to use various rooms in different ways – you can swap around living room, bedroom, study and so on. We might use certain rooms in summer because they are shady and others in winter because they get the sun. I’m not suggesting the Cook House is at all villa-like – it has sunlight through it, for starters – but it does share with the villa type a resilience and flexibility in accommodating changing lifestyles. And both the Cook House and the villa also have in common a serious concern with presenting adornment to the street.

There is a significant amount of materials on display on the Cook House exterior. People have said that the house respects the texture and scale of the streetscape – and it does – but its materials don’t particularly relate to the neighbours. Sure, there are some weatherboards at the back but the front is a panoply of unglazed terracotta tiles, various metals, all sorts of glasses, marble, timber fins, and so on. But this isn’t ostentation; rather it is joie de vivre. This delight in decoration isn’t that distant from the villa. The house preserves its privacy but is not walled off. Tucked behind a modern take on the picket fence, the sunroom, with its ranks of glassy louvres, is a kind of contemporary bay and like the villa’s lace curtains, the vertical timber fins allow adjustment for reasons of decorum. It is a house that engages with street life and at night the sunroom and marble shower box glow like a lantern, lighting the way up the hill to Ponsonby’s nightlife. The architect’s delight in quirky details and in finding different ways of doing things is carried right through the interior of the house, with two different types of stairs, structural experiments with trusses and all sorts of different sunshading and view-enhancing devices. The house is a sweet little box of tricks. It doesn’t follow the well-worn path of the minimal and cool; rather, it parades the architect’s spirit and love of life.
Auckland is adolescent and it’s a wee bit early to turn whole tracts of the inner suburbs over to conservation. Yes, we all like Auckland’s villas and bungalows and we cringe when we see them or their streetscapes buggered up, but it’s good to see that decent designers can still sneak houses like this into heritage areas. This is a young city in the South Pacific and we have got a lot to learn, but we’ve also got some thing we can teach the world. This is a house of wit, joy, love and skill that makes a significant contribution to the contemporary city in the new century. u