Take Two
_Words Melinda Williams
Photography Emma-Jane Hetherington_
Sensitive planning made this Auckland bungalow renovation into a home that enjoys the best of old and new.
You know you’ve found a good architect when he advises you against buying a particular do-up property, you ignore his advice completely and buy the house anyway, and he still manages to transform it into a beautifully livable space. Architect Tim Dorrington recalls the day when a couple, who he had been working on a renovation scheme for, called him to come and see another property that they were thinking of buying instead. The house in Herne Bay was “a fairly nice bungalow but it had had quite a lot of different things done to it over the years that weren’t particularly nice,” he says. “It seemed like there were a lot of mistakes that we would have to take out first, and the whole house was oriented the wrong way. The living room was in the southern corner of the house.” Despite Dorrington expressing misgivings, his clients merrily decided to trade in the Freeman’s Bay house he was working on, and start afresh with a scheme for the Herne Bay property, which involved juxtaposing a modern, contemporary ‘box’ onto the existing old bungalow. “Well, there’s always something you can do!” he shrugs, philosophically.
It took a lot of internal “jiggery-pokery” to make the various spaces of the house work, says Dorrington. “North is where north is, and the house is where the house is, and you can’t change those things.” There wasn’t much room between the front of the house and the northern boundary, but in order to make the living ‘heart’ of the house as big as possible for the couple and their two children, Dorrington decided to push the front of the house out further, and turn the front yard into a concreted courtyard. “Mainly, we changed around the public and private rooms. The original house had a kitchen and dining in the front but they only had one bedroom, and the rest of the house was for entertaining. We made it more of a family home. It’s three bedrooms upstairs now, and they’re at the back of the house, where it’s quieter and darker. We reintroduced the Victorian planning idea of having all the public rooms at the front and the private rooms at the back.”
From the front, the house is now almost unrecognisable, with a modern, rectilinear concrete profile. A tall gate in the property’s fence opens to a path that leads past the main courtyard space to the left, to the solid pivot front door. It’s hard to imagine that this clean, concrete space with ficus creeping up the walls was once overgrown with bamboo and ivy. “It was pretty skoady,” says Dorrington. It was just a bricked courtyard with a wrap-around verandah, because the main room was a lot smaller, probably a third of the size it is now. It was very overgrown with bamboo and ivy and there was a water feature, like a trough.” To give the living area as much space as possible, Dorrington had the courtyard cleared right to the boundary wall, and added interest in the form of vertical layering – “the concrete wall with the ficus growing up it, then the planter behind it, and then the timber fence behind that.” He also had the level of the courtyard brought up to exactly the same level as the internal flooring, to ease the distinction between indoors and out and allow a table or sofa to straddle the threshold between the courtyard and living room evenly. Floor to ceiling framed cedar sliding doors give the living area a sense of lightness, and can be pushed toward either side, depending on how the indoor/outdoor space is being used.
The kitchen/living space is open and airy, with light pouring in through a large, frameless window at one end of the kitchen set centrally to the kitchen island. “It leads your eye out to the big window and the greenery outside, and the lushness of that,” Dorrington explains. “We were trying to create a garden room. Material-wise, we wanted the whole back wall of the kitchen to be panels of white, with as much of the kitchen as we could get away with being hidden. And everything is, except for the cooking bay
itself – the fridge, the pantry, and a secret door into the laundry.”
Across the wide central entrance hall is the lounge/media room; a warm space with a gridded wall of shelving, which will house a projector that screens television and films on the large blind that pulls down over the main north-facing window. “The idea is that it’s a smaller room, more of a cosy space, with the timber floor and the dark liquorice wallpaper,” says Dorrington. “The other room is more of a family room, with more rugged floors.”
The central corridor that divides the rooms was a key focus of the renovation. “All the rooms come off that corridor and it had really nice floorboards that we wanted to maintain. We also wanted to maintain the central front door.” To create a sense of entry, Dorrington chose a solid leaf pivot door, and extended the entrance walls just far enough to give some privacy, yet still allow the living space to flow across the corridor. “Seeing how that entry straddles the living area and getting the comfort it does was very satisfying,” Dorrington acknowledges. “If someone comes to knock on the door and you open it to talk to them, they’re not looking straight into the private zone. But the most satisfying thing was seeing it all come together. It was a little bit scary putting a contemporary box onto an old house. It definitely has two faces to it – you see it from the front and it’s a contemporary house but from the back you can’t see any of that – it’s a pretty traditional bungalow.” We don’t doubt the clients feel they’ve got the best of both worlds in their home.
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