Simple yet complex home design
Sir Ian Athfield, the maverick architect, (almost) toed the line in this Mid-century home – but still gave things a characteristic wobble.
During a short period in the 1960s, a fresh architectural movement bubbled up in Christchurch. In this extract from the book I Never Met a Straight Line I Didn’t Like, photographer Mary Gaudin and writer Matthew Arnold explore how Midcentury architects created what is arguably the closest thing New Zealand has to a modern indigenous style.
Ian Athfield – or ‘‘Ath’’ as almost everyone knew him – was an individualist who grew up in 1950s Christchurch before moving north to launch a career as New Zealand’s most affable maverick architect.
By 1968 he had set up his own architectural practice in Wellington and was making waves in the nation’s capital by building himself a bonkers home-cum-office-cum-politicalstatement on a prominent slope above the CBD.
The Athfield house resembles a post-modern Greek village, a large clump of white-plastered angles in motion, pitching and rolling down the hill. It was, and still is, bewildering.
Ath was inherently antiestablishment but social and brimming with good-humour, charisma and creativity. He attracted people and projects alike. From his Wellington hillside experiment he took on commissions from friends and friends of friends who admired his exuberant style and personality. Jaunty towers and turrets, circular nautical windows and irregular, up-anddown forms fast became his trademark.
Which makes the Jones House a bit of an anomaly in the Athfield back catalogue. Given his renegade reputation it’s surprising that, when his old high school rowing coach, Bruce Jones, called with a commission from Christchurch, Ath paused, shifted gears, and penned a design very much unlike his fruity Wellington work.
Instead, he embraced the distinctive, but well-mannered Christchurch Style – a Danish model of housing; transplanted, adapted and perfected on the Canterbury Plains by Ath’s former mentor, the master of New Zealand modernism, Sir Miles Warren.
The ingredients of the regional Christchurch Style are deceptively simple – concrete block walls painted pure white; steeply-pitched roofs with shaved eaves; deep-set windows; and fantastically tall chimneys. It sounds simple, yet resulted in complex, sculptural and beautifully detailed homes in a style that, although borrowed from Scandinavia, was handled in such a way that made it feel like it belonged in New Zealand.
Ath’s work on the steep Wellington hills was reactionary and startling, and this home on a flat site in the Christchurch suburbs is comparatively polite and subdued, but no less exciting.
In fact, it’s a happy marriage of the two ideals. There’s a cheekiness to it, and despite reading from the Christchurch script, Ath gave things a little wobble, naturally.
Quite unlike the familiar row of neighbouring bungalows, all lined up neatly and paying careful attention to the street, the Jones house breaks the roadside rhythm and sits right at the very back of its deep, rectangular section. There’s no picket fence, but instead a long view to a striking, abstract gable with just one large square window, placed high and offcentre. It’s good.
Every view is asymmetrical. The pointy peaks and corners have been sliced from the building and the rooflines dip, rise and intersect at angles that give the house an unexpectedly playful tempo.
The Jones family moved out in the mid 1980s – to another, much more kooky, Athfield design on the Cashmere Hills – and this home is now owned by modern antiques dealer Ross Morrison and rented to his friend, Brad Roach.
It’s Brad’s collection of art and objects in the photographs. Brad has been collecting for more than 20 years and has moved his much-loved things many times over, from house to house – everything from a villa to a warehouse – but it’s here that they feel most at home.