Living Memory

Architect Gerrad Hall spent his childhood on a farm just north of Auckland where now the gurgle of a brook has surrendered to the white noise of a motorway, and the hay barn, a built barometer of the seasons, is long gone. In summer, when the hay was piled high in the rafters, working under the closeness of the roof was a very different spatial experience to the barn in winter as, little by little, the stockpile diminished leaving a lofty, expansive realm.

This property in the back blocks of Mangawhai is a collection of buildings that pay homage to an agricultural history, not only of the land here in this secret valley but of the owners, one of whom also grew up on a dairy farm. Gerrad: “For her this was a nostalgic return to her roots; she came to me with sketches drawn on butter paper and we designed the house together.”

The couple are in the film industry, have grown-up children living overseas, and had completed a city courtyard house with Gerrad a decade ago. This new undertaking was their bucolic escape from careers where work can consume 24 hours of the day, then dwindle to nothing.

Three forms, a double-height barn where the living takes place, a tower with a library and extra bedroom, and a more traditional shed which houses the garage and workshop, are linked by the entry motor court. There are several references here to the rustic idyll: the gabled ends of the main building for instance, the bare concrete block of the retaining wall of the tower, and the red corrugated cladding on the workshop. “There’s modesty in the materials. We didn’t want it to look clean and modern,” says Gerrad.

But once you walk across a bridge and through an unassuming doorway, the low-key pastoral presence gives way to something quite different. “You enter the house from the top floor and move down into the space,” explains Gerrad. At first though, a bridge spanning the length of the barn leads across the void to the master bedroom; the aspect of being here, perched just beneath the ceiling, enforces an intimate connection with the structure.

The verticality of the planning is better experienced from the living zone below – even so, this is not all showy height and volume with little modulation. Textural insertions, many hand-built by the owners, provide a crafted appeal. Secondhand bricks recycled from the city house form a boundary around the scullery and bathroom area. Built-in timber bench seating makes a cosy corner in the stepped-down lounge. The raw warmth of a Corten-faced fireplace does not overwhelm the walls, which are clad in sawn and oiled totara sleepers from a garden shop.

It took five years, once the framework was up, for the owners to finish the house – although they love a mission that’s an ever-moving goal post. “For them, each element is a creative act,” says Gerrad. “They didn’t just rush in and get it done. They like the challenge and to develop concepts: it’s not just structure; it’s sculpture.”

For the exterior of the main home they sourced rough hardwood battens, then directed how they were ‘randomly’ spaced. The effect is one Japanese author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki would have enjoyed. When he said, “Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,” he was no doubt thinking of the patterns of light that become moving theatre across the floors throughout the day. “Darkness,” argues Gerrad, “is a better way to define the classic New Zealand building – the shearing sheds, whare, churches of the past are all linked to an earthy, evocative feel.” Gerrad used darkness to advantage in another way too. “Everything we didn’t want to draw attention to has been composed in black – the steel framework, the ply walls.”

So, in as much as high windows above the kitchen bench frame the spectacle of a stand of tall, native bush, this house is introspective too. There’s the opportunity for total immersion in the home theatre that provides hours of escape from reality or to read in the library on the top floor of the tower with its fortified view of the valley. But why drift into another world, when there’s plenty to be explored here? When they’re not maintaining four hectares, keeping the man-made pond weed free, digging the soil in a massive vegetable garden or visiting Neil, the solo eel who lives in a stream at the bottom of the property, the couple is imagining how to repurpose an old farm gate on another corner of the land.

“In this environment, Turk, the huntaway, an ex-farm dog, thinks he’s won the lottery,” says Gerrad. Never happier than when they have a project on the go, his owners haven’t done too badly either.