A peep inside one of Auckland's most interesting houses

By ANNE GIBSON

Designing a south-facing house on Auckland's waterfront presented a challenge for Devonport architect Geoff Richards and his clients Keith and Wendy Gosling. So they came up with a scheme to build a house which was only one room wide.

That meant the northerly side of the house was open to the sun but also took full advantage of the view over the sea and towards the city's CBD to the south. That was a little over three years ago.

The house won a national Institute of Architects award in 1998, recognising excellence in design for Richards and his project team which included Ray van Wayenburg, Ginny Pedlow and Annette Alexander.

The Devonport home has just been sold for $4 million to the new head of Independent Newspapers Ltd and Sky TV, Tom Mockridge and his wife Jacquie.

The Goslings built the house in Devonport but sold it to the Mockridges and moved to Ponsonby for family reasons. Everyone had moved over the other side of the bridge, says Keith Gosling, so there was little point in their staying on the North Shore. "Serene, quiet and peaceful" is how he describes his former home.

The minimalist concrete creation came about from the brief, which was to produce a simple, modern home. Richards began by arranging the building along the seaward part of the site, allowing the greatest enjoyment of the harbour and at the same time creating spaces sheltered from the wind and less influenced by the powerful harbour views.

The house looks directly across to the city and the port.

Commenting on the design, the institute said the house showed great flair, and Richards and his team had resisted the temptation to "overwork" their design.

The judging panel reported at the time: "The house employs a restrained palette of materials: glass in steel frames, plastered concrete blockwork and concrete floor slabs inside and out are the main elements.

"Large floating flat roofs of minimum thickness are frequently disconnected from the solid walls by high-level windows and height variations between spaces create the impression of a series of closely connected pavilions."

The two-bedroom house has a studio apartment above the three-car garage, heated lap pool, two sheltered courtyards and underfloor, gas-fired heating. One courtyard is designed as an "active area" through which the house is entered, and includes the swimming pool. The other courtyard is a more reflective, quiet area.

The house opens on to both courtyards and forms the connection between them.

Richards acknowledges that the house is unusual in that it has few doors. Most of the rooms flow openly from one to another.

"The only doors are on the guest toilet, main bedroom, its ensuite, second bedroom and its ensuite.

"The house is not a cellular arrangement from a central corridor. It is an almost entirely open arrangement."

Materials in the kitchen and bathrooms are unorthodox as well: "We used polished concrete for the kitchen benches, laundry and bathrooms," he says, noting that even the main bath sits in a polished-concrete "structure".

Another unusual aspect of the house is its varying roof lines, rising as the internal stud heights change, from 2.4m, 2.7m, 3m up to 3.6m: "I wanted to express that on the exterior and create floating planes like the strata in the cliff below the house near the sea."

Stunning lighting is another feature of the house and an international lighting firm, Belgium-based Kreon, uses pictures of the house in a marketing brochure to show clients the innovative use of its products.

Richards is no stranger to awards. He won a national architecture award in 1993 for Hotel du Vin at the De Redcliffe vineyard in the Mangatawhiri Valley south of Auckland. He won a regional award a year before that for The Retreat in Taupo.

Richards and his team have just designed a new music school for the University of Canterbury. Construction is expected to start later this year.

"We're a smallish practice," he says, "but we are looking to produce fresh, imaginative, intelligent, sensitive architecture."

* Anne Gibson is the Herald's property editor.