On a challenging site in Auckland’s Saint Heliers, architect Mark Frazerhurst has designed a unique, stacked, four-storey home that criss-crosses down a slope. The architect reflects on the deeply personal, unexpectedly long, and joyfully hands-on journey of designing and building a home for his mum and dad – a project that tested patience, celebrated craftsmanship, and proved that good design is always worth the wait.
It’s no small task building a house.
Trust me, I know. I’ve been involved in delivering homes for clients for over 20 years, engrossed in every stage of the process as an architect.
The general public tends to know very little about architects, the why, how and what we do as a profession. I guess if you asked nine out of 10 people on the street, their impressions of architects would be of black skivvy-wearing dreamers who cost a lot, and create more problems than they solve. However, that’s a story for another day – and a gargantuan challenge to break down that stigma.
As architects, we approach projects as an opportunity to shape and change the built environment for the better, and to enhance and enrich people’s lives through the spaces they inhabit.
Although it is just one of the hundreds of projects I’ve been involved in since starting my small practice, 13 years ago my parents sold the family house I grew up in, purchased a small steep piece of land and entrusted me to create them a home.
There’s no better client to collaborate with than one who trusts you implicitly. Let’s face it – if your own parents don’t, then no one will. Trust in an architectural relationship is the core ingredient of a successful outcome. That’s not to say trust is all it takes. Oh no. There are a myriad of variables, inputs, decisions, and outcomes to consider in the design and construction of a home.
It’s no small task building a house.
I started the design process for my Mum and Dad by challenging any preconceived notions they had of what they thought they wanted and questioning whether there were better, more efficient, and cost-effective ways of achieving results.
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Advertise with NZME.The design process ran like any other, with the usual plethora of consent challenges, site constraints, existing utility services issues and budgetary restrictions. All in all, a pleasurable process, with the best clients in the world.
The first thing to buckle was the timeframe. What was initially intended as a four- or maybe five-year process ended up taking 12 years to complete – two in design, and a decade in construction. Because good things take time. Right?
The conversation around time/cost/quality is one I have with each and every client I’m engaged by. My process ethos won’t concede on quality and I’m yet to find a client with an unlimited budget, so the time aspect is usually the first cookie to crumble. This doesn’t come without its compromises – whether that be long-term living in a rental (six years in a basement unit in my parents’ case) or an extended period of making morning coffee and scones for a building team working around your daily lives in a sea of dust during a live-in house alteration project.
However, compromising on the time aspect allows you to spend more time refining and researching, as well as accommodating a broader range of subcontractors, materials and products, which may not necessarily be available on a tight turnaround.
In the case of my parents, we engaged a fantastic builder and his team, who I’d worked with a number of times before, on a labour-only basis. Again, trust is paramount. We carried the labour budget as far as my parents could, for the structure and building envelope works, and took over the construction reins ourselves when the labour pot had run dry. A retired pilot and an architect on the tools – what could possibly go wrong? In the end, not much, actually.
We set up accounts with merchants and suppliers, picked up products where possible, and consolidated orders for delivery where we could. There are no winners when paying two delivery fees for two half-loads in a day. Likewise, it’s in no one’s favour to pay for excess concrete only to pay to send half a cubic metre back to the yard. Better to spend the time modelling, calculating and recalculating correct quantities to front-foot the process. There’s a huge amount of waste associated with building and construction (you can Google it), and at a time when we know we need to do better for our children and future generations, eliminating – or at least limiting – any waste product should be a no-brainer. The most sustainable way to build is just not to, so if we have to build, then let’s just do it better.
“Measure twice and cut once”, and “do it once and do it right”. My grandad taught my dad, who, in turn, instilled these wise words in me. Let’s eliminate the factory send-backs associated with mismeasuring and reduce the amount we dump in the skip, and adopt these adages.
It’s no small task building a house.
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Advertise with NZME.It’s completely possible to move into a partially completed home, when it’s a private project, if you so desire. However, the contract works insurance can’t convert to home and contents insurance until the code compliance certificate has been obtained – which wasn’t for another five years after Mum and Dad moved into their empty shell, which added a not insubstantial cost to overheads. We hooked up a “temporary” kitchen pulled from another project under demolition at the time and set out to finish the bathroom as the first completed space in what then became a linear, room-by-room, space-by-space, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other project.
No task is insurmountable, and breaking the project down into smaller (but no less daunting) tasks allowed us to chip away in a logical, streamlined and methodical way. We spent thousands of hours hauling buckets of backfill, building doors, crafting stairs, fabricating custom linings, fashioning light fittings and building cabinetry – all in the interest of saving money by doing it ourselves. Which, for an architect, is as much a pleasurable experience as it is an exercise in education.
It’s no small task building a house.
The last 10% of the construction process so often takes 90% of the time – or, if you’re a rookie and a perfectionist, more like 99%. It’s that long tail of the beast which so often causes even the most resilient of clients to fall into the depths of despair. Projected deadlines come and go through no fault other than the nature of the beast. I obviously didn’t (and still don’t) have the wide-ranging and enviable skills of a carpenter builder, but I can honestly proclaim to be a craftsperson – designing and building my wares. I’d love other architects to have, and seize, the opportunity I did – to undertake a project of this nature, and get as hands-on and engrossed in the process of planning, design, management, operations and construction as I had the privilege of experiencing.
I am slightly biased, but “good design” is a huge fundamental, and – I’d also go so far as to say – the most important component in the process of creating a home (or any building for that matter). After all, without the most suitable design response and planning for a site, you can’t achieve the best holistic outcome, no matter how perfect the construction execution or how meticulously the process is administered.
The outcome – or rather the conclusion of the journey – came 10 years after we engaged the earthworks contractor to drill the first pile hole. I won’t say “final” outcome, because I don’t think a home is ever final. Homes, as with all buildings, live, evolve and change over time with different owners, users and generations, adapting constantly to the ways in which we live our lives. In my parents’ case, the house we’ve created will serve them until it can’t – until they can’t manage the stairs any longer, or maintain the upkeep. Then it will pass on to another user.
When this happens, I’ll be sad – as will my parents – but we’ll rest assured knowing we achieved something momentous, over the period of more than a decade. We set out to achieve a brief, exceeded it – and ultimately created something we believe works for the betterment of the built environment, and the enrichment of my parents’ lives. All with sheer determination, perseverance, and hard work.
After all, it’s no small task building a house.
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