I won’t pretend I’m not close to this story: the project you see on these pages is a kind of hybrid carport-studio-gate designed for my friends David Straight and Anna Jackson in Arch Hill, Tāmaki Makaurau by Tim Gittos and Caro Robertson of Spacecraft Architects.
It’s a delightful architectural response to the most analogue of briefs. But first, some context. Straight and Jackson’s place is beautiful. They’ve lived here for seven years, in an ethereal house that is only nominally a villa. It was moved onto this site back in the 1980s, saved from demolition when the Northwestern Motorway was built through the valley between Arch Hill and Kingsland.There’s a long, slightly winding shared driveway, with villas placed on tall piles up the slope. In the early 2000s, it was renovated for a client by architect Tim Dorrington, who created a church-like space, removing all the internal walls in the main living area.
Straight and Jackson never really intended to build something new in front of it. That idea emerged during the pandemic when they found themselves using their small second bedroom as a shared office. “It kind of came out of necessity,” says Jackson. “David couldn’t really handle listening to me talk to people on calls all day.” Says Straight: “I was the background to everyone’s Zoom calls. You become self-conscious when you’re someone else’s background.”
Then, they bought an electric car, which needed somewhere to charge that wasn’t just out in front of the house. They also started to feel a need to define their space a little more formally. While the enclave has its charms, the shared driveway led directly to their front steps, which seemed to imply their property was public space. The undesirable view of the thick, trunk-like foundation piles that sit under the house was another consideration.
They turned to Gittos and Robertson, for whom Straight has shot almost every project in the past decade or so. It was a companionable kind of collaboration. “They’re so articulate,” says Robertson. “They really explained specifically what it was and what it needed to be.” They also have very particular, and very good, taste: it needed to be understated in approach, with honest materials.
Gittos and Robertson’s response was not what anyone expected: a rhomboid shape that sits hard on the boundary and hard up against the piles, stretching from one side to the other, containing studio, carport, front gate and wood storage. It solved four problems with one angled line, covering up the piles at the front and giving the house a ground-level presence it didn’t have before.
The approach was one the architects have taken a few times. “We often talk to clients about this,” says Gittos. “Generally speaking, if you put your building on the shitty bit and look into the nice bit, you’ve done your job, because you haven’t ruined the nice bit.” Here, the shitty bit was a piece of land that was previously covered in concrete, including a chunk that Straight and Jackson didn’t realise was theirs.
Now, when you approach the house, you come around the corner of the driveway and there’s a long, low, enigmatic box, wrapped in vertical macrocarpa cladding. There’s a lump of stone that acts as a front step, and two sliding doors that open up the carport, which is laid with gravel that crunches underfoot. Planting is by Philip Smith of O2 Landscapes and will slowly swallow the metal mesh at the back.
The studio is at one end, accessed via the carport. It’s lined in Strandboard with a built-in seat and bookshelves: there are no exterior windows except for a long slot of a skylight, which looks up through the liquidambar tree. In summer, there’s a green canopy of leaves; in winter, there are the bare arms of the tree. “I did think at one point it was crazy that we were spending this much money on a carport,” says Jackson, “but it’s actually so much of its own space.”
It was built by Ben Gommers, of Gommers Construction, from the most prosaic of materials: a standard grid of trusses, lined with fibre cement, and with bands of clear polycarbonate roofing that create deep pools of light and shadow. The grid was partly inspired by architect Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion, with its grid of deep concrete beams. “He was trying to recreate that soft, Nordic light,” says Gittos. “We liked the idea of trying to get the same effect out of essentially flimsy stuff, so doing the trusses in something cheaply available but matt and monolithic felt obvious.”
It creates a shadowy, dappled sort of light, which pleases the photographer. “It’s constantly surprising, what the light does in there,” says Straight. “When you spend time in the building, you chart the year through watching the light move. You see when it comes up, and what it’s doing at certain times of the day. It’s a good building for that.”
