In the first of two My Modern House visits that will take us to New Zealand, graphic designer Amy Yalland tells us how her and her partner, Jonty Valentine, stripped back a warehouse in Auckland’s Henderson suburb, revealing its functional beauty and spatial potential in the process. Read on to discover why this former manufacturing plant makes for the perfect home for the couple and their two-year-old daughter, Juniper, as well as for their design studio, Index.
Amy: “Jonty, my partner, and I were living in Sandringham (10 minutes from Auckland central) in a commercial live-work apartment, where we could have design meetings, store our risograph printers and library, and live. It was more central than this, but renting was expensive, so we started looking further out for somewhere we could renovate long-term to house Index, our design studio. We had been together as a couple, and working together as a design studio, for nearly five years, so thought we were ready.
“We bought the warehouse five years ago, in late 2015, and we spent the first three months having quite a lot of fun demolishing parts of inner rooms ourselves before our Sandringham lease ran up, then we moved into the shell.
“It was not positioned where I would have considered looking (in a busy industrial street far out in Henderson, West Auckland, with a mechanic at the front), but Jonty insisted we look at it, as the unit was enormous (over 2,000 sq ft), inexpensive and had good potential.
“The warehouse sits right next door to an empty lot of land, destined to be houses, but which is currently mostly gorse and blackberry bushes; the birds like it. We are also close to the train station, and the cycle trail that leads to the city. It’s a strange mix of influences. Our neighbours are nice: a food packaging company with beep-beep vans that our toddler, Juniper, laughs at.
“The whole complex of warehouses was built in the mid-late 1980s for industrial use. Before we bought it, our space was used for manufacturing hot water pumps, as offices, and for light engineering.
“We’ve made significant changes to the house since we moved here, and we’ve done everything ourselves, slowly. We wanted to optimize the space for our needs, and we also wanted to create zones or areas to divide up the large space of the warehouse, so we thought we’d work that out after living here for a bit.
“You’d never know now, but our work just made it look ‘neutral’. After demolishing the unnecessary half-height offices that took up the main space and painting the whole place white it just felt clean and simple – that was the first years’ work.
“The concrete floor in the main space has traces of the floor plans of each of the rooms we removed, which we left to document the space’s history. The mezzanine was a closed-in double-height set of rooms that we gutted to open everything up, which we clad with Monterey cypress, sourced from a local timber mill and installed with advice from Jonty’s stepfather on the weight-bearing aspects of the new beams.
“Next we really needed some storage, so together we designed a series of large modular ply units, some built-in to house our pantry laundry and kitchen, and some on wheels for our studio materials, books and paper. Jonty built these and I did the finishing.
“We have a few nice timber pieces of furniture (like Jonty’s 1970s Scottish dining table), and studio ceramics which I love and wanted to highlight, so our ply units act as simple forms that visually recede to let those key pieces speak.
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发表于 2020-8-4 01:33:17
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