Quirky Athfield house up for grabs
‘‘There are internal and external stairs, and they are quite amazing’’
Matt Wilson is such an Ian Athfield fan, he once built a 15-square-metre sleep-out modelled on one of the late architect’s houses.
Five years ago he was able to buy the real thing – a quirky Athfield house perched on a steep, bushy site in Point Howard, Wellington. Wilson has spent much of the past five years renovating the 1970s house but is now moving in with his partner, so has listed the house for sale with Shane Brockelbank and Megan
Bailey of Professionals Redcoats.
The 160-square-metre house has a signature Athfield design – it steps up the hill with a succession of separate rooms or pods providing wonderful views out to the harbour and bush.
‘‘It would have been such a hard section to build on, but what
Athfield did is quite superb,’’ Wilson says. ‘‘There are internal and external stairs, and they are quite amazing.’’
The house has three living areas and three to four bedrooms, depending on how the rooms are used. There is also a temperaturecontrolled wine cellar, and a roof terrace accessed by external stairs, with a small yoga room.
Wilson, who opened the Seashore Cabaret in Petone, which he has since sold, says he has loved living in the house, and retains his love of Athfield’s architecture. While most of the architect’s greater works are in Wellington, Athfield designed some in Christchurch and further south.
Julia Gatley, a senior lecturer at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland, discusses the architect in her 2012 book Athfield Architects. Gatley illuminates how his career was informed and influenced by his hometown of Christchurch.
As a young man in post-war Canterbury, he was influenced by an emerging and distinctly local form of ‘‘brutalism’’ that became known as the Christchurch School.
Gatley says a summer working at Warren & Mahoney during the early 1960s may have informed his most important building – the complex of his homes and offices that flows down a Khandallah hillside in Wellington like a Greek village.
That project featured in the Prime TV series Designing Dreams, with architect Roger Walker, a longtime friend of the late architect, taking presenter Matthew Ridge through the house.