Fife Street

RESIDENTIAL

• PROJECT

  Fife Street

• LOCATION

  Westmere, Auckland

• STATUS

  Ongoing

• AWARDS

  • Te Kāhui Whaihanga NZ Institute of Architects Auckland Architecture Awards Housing - Alterations and Additions

  • Te Kāhui Whaihanga NZ Institute of Architects Auckland Resene Colour Award - Alterations and Additions

A Story of Loving Iterations: a house for an artist and an architect, to accommodate expanding and contracting family and guests. A place which is constantly developing, without ever having had an ‘end-game’ in sight. It has gone from 3 bedrooms to four, back to 3 bedrooms and workspace, and could well revert to 4 bedrooms if required.

A place that has grown to accept the occupants and the occupants have grown to understand the house, over 20 years and multiple alterations. If it had been designed and built in the early days it would have been a different house.

It is not about photo-ready tidiness, it is about living in comfort with architectural delights: the central bathroom with a view through to the garden, the way early morning shadows glance across the ply and GRC fire surround, the informally hung artworks, the wavy handrail up the irregular entry steps…

The house is a traditional timber framed bungalow and alterations have continued in the same system. Downstairs excavated areas are concrete slab with concrete fins to support the upper level. Concrete has been introduced in the gardens to continue the theme of a roughly built curving driveway wall present from the original house.

The rear garden has been terraced with concrete walls and pond, and an in-situ concrete ‘bus shelter’ provides seating and containment to the rear courtyard.

New extensions are designed as floating planes of colour, clad in fibre cement sheet with exposed fixings, to identify new elements from earlier iterations.

Internally, silver-beech plywood and GRC have been used to create streams of identity flowing through the existing spaces. Variety has been celebrated: there has been no desire to make all the rooms consistent, for example different skirting details in different rooms quietly suggest the different periods of construction.