Fisher & Paykel Appliances' Michael Elmore inside the new Auckland Experience Centre. Photo / Michael Craig
A muehlenbeckia “chandelier” hangs above one kitchen showroom, a harakeke installation is above another, while an 8m-long, spiral LED Italian Flos light brightens the dark above a 9.5m-long, swamp kauri, 22-seater dining room table, thought to be from a log around 40,000 years old.
Dark, moody, indigenous - welcome to the new Fisher & Paykel Auckland Experience Centre - an 820sq m area in part of the bottom floor of the Crest apartments at 199 Great North Rd, Grey Lynn.
If Giltrap’s new headquarters by Warren and Mahoney at 119 Great North Rd is a “jewellery box for cars”, then the collaboration between Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, Alt Group and the talented 37-year-old Rufus Knight’s Knight Associates is the same for kitchens, laundries and outdoor cooking.
How could something so utilitarian, even perhaps pedestrian, become the hero of interior design?
“We take people to Waiheke, Queenstown and then here,” explains F&P Appliances’ design and brand vice-president, Mark Elmore, now based in East Tāmaki but eventually moving to Penrose in a $220m three-building scheme where construction starts early next year.
“This is a physical manifestation of our brand,” he says of the showroom where ovens are more likely to be controlled by digital pads than knobs and the outdoor BBQ area is styled along American lines, designed for twin outdoor eating areas. .
Think flatscreens showcasing our stunning scenery, including West Coast beaches and a 4000-year-old sculptural trunk of swamp kauri, split lengthwise to uncover the contours of its natural heart.
On entry, you’re greeted by the bulky, hip-high, six-ton basalt rock, turned in to a sculpture modern interpretation of Tumutumuwhenua who was an ancestor of the Ngāti Whātua peoples, with its carved bowl of fresh water, rising and falling in sync with the Waitematā tides.
Rammed-earth and black sand-infused plaster walls surround tōtara flooring, made from a 700-year-old wind-felled log.
“Keep in mind, 80 per cent of our products are sold overseas,” Elmore says, telling how the showroom is as much about voicing this country’s story as showing off one of the iconic local brands from the company which is Chinese-owned but founded in New Zealand in 1934.
So it’s no surprise that mid-morning, an Asian group is finishing up in the chef-led commercial kitchen, served kawakawa tea with freshly made pastries. The centre is expected to attract many foreign and local architects, designers, developers and clients.
That 9.5m “waka table” for 22 people with Simon James chairs was designed to represent the entrepreneurial spirit of Pāora Tūhaere, the Ngāti Whātua chief who bought a schooner in 1863 and sailed between here and Rarotonga, establishing trade routes and enduring connections. Tūhaere’s reversal of traditional migration narratives – his “chasing the sun” back across the Pacific – is captured by that Flos feature light of blown-glass modules, which signifies star navigation across the sky and hangs majestically above the table.
Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei’s Rangimāriē Hūnia says the building was a result of discussions about reciprocity and authenticity that were held over a long period of time. At the pōwhiri in August, she applauded the way Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei cultural narratives, taonga and the natural materials of Tāmaki Makaurau were woven in to the display showroom.
Knight said he worked closely with associate director Dahlia Ghani who led the project with him. Decorative elements like the chandeliers were commissioned by Alt Group as the creative directors of the project, Knight said. Top Auckland graphic designer Dean Poole led Alt’s involvement and he is a co-founder of that business.
Fisher & Paykel Appliances has experience centres in other countries but this is the largest and most ambitious, created by design partnerships with international kitchen design companies Boffi, Arclinea and Henrybuilt.
The materially pared-back and monochrome Boffi minimal kitchen shows how combining seamlessly integrated products with visually recessive appliances gives a singular, aesthetically cohesive architectural look.
The Arclinea contemporary kitchen has a layered material approach with Italian stone, bronze PVD and fossil oak surfaces.
The Henrybuilt professional kitchen is the first by that American company in the southern hemisphere and has a 9.5m-long island and integrated table with a crafted, solid-walnut timber and stone. It’s in that area that our native muehlenbeckia shrub, with its prostrate branches, is used as the hanging hero centrepiece.
Poole said Mt Eden’s Isadia floral design studio made the shrub and flax over-bench decorations.
Isabel Johnston, who owns Isadia, said she and business partner Lydia Reusser designed three decorations.
Asked how the 3m-long muehlenbeckia installation held together, she said: “We used wire and the actual form of the shrub to weave it in to itself. Then it was hung on wire cables from the ceiling. We built it on site. We used lots of pieces of the plant. First, we had to dry those to remove all the leaves which took about three weeks.”
“They’re like floral installations,” she said of the plant and flax art.
The flax was created by making rope knots using the fibre “and we kept on building crazy loops until we got it to a shape we were happy with”.
A hanging akeake branch was installed on a wall above a seating area, also by Isadia.
“We selected the branch and dictated with Alt Group how it was hung,” Johnson said.
Fisher & Paykel Appliances worked with Boffi on the laundry and wardrobe areas, where washing machines, driers and a new fabric care cabinet (looks like a fridge, more like a mini-dry cleaner or steamer, selling for just over $6000) is built into a luxurious walk-in wardrobe.
And the cost of all this?
Elmore isn’t saying but, certainly, the appliance giant’s property footprint is changing across three sites and is more a story of growth and expansion than anything else:
That new HQ is partly modelled on Rotorua’s hugely praised Scion Te Whare Nui o Tuteata by RTA Studio with Irving Smith Architects. There’s a connection between F&P Appliances’ chief and RTA, so the joke at the appliance business is that the Rotorua building was a prototype for what will rise in Penrose.
In Grey Lynn, the centre’s commercial kitchen’s menu was designed to demonstrate the mastery of the temperature concept which F&P Appliances promotes and includes:
From the underground carpark, Elmore noses a black Tesla out on to Sussex St, heading to East Tāmaki HQ.
At the start, we were served kawakawa tea but, at the end, it’s coffee, pastries and a cold dessert in pottery ramekins, then it’s out of that dark, moody indigenous centre, into the intense roadworks on Great North Rd and the sunlight of the city.
Anne Gibson has been the Herald’s property editor for 23 years, has won many awards, written books and covered property extensively here and overseas.
The store is one of the most profitable and popular in Foodstuffs' North Island co-op.