Tower of Strength

Pulling down their old house was not an option for the Quatermass family. So they made the most of its good points and added a tower that lets them keep watch over the spectacular Muriwai coastline.

Words: Eve Pillman  Photographs: Kevin Emirali

In New Zealand we are a bit too eager to pull down old buildings. And most of them aren’t even middle-aged by world standards. "Look at Queen Street," says Richard Quatermass in defence of his belief. Buildings have barely mellowed when the demolition teams move in.

When Richard and Megan began planning an extension to their house overlooking the wild west-coast beach of Muriwai, little more than half an hour from Auckland, just about everyone told them to knock down the old house and start afresh. The house is almost a century old, a jerry-built hybrid of villa and bungalow. The floors are a cheerful mix of kauri, matai and rimu boards of different widths. Its heritage value is doubly questionable as it was built elsewhere and moved to the site about 30 years ago. And it’s at the wrong end of the half-hectare section, missing the best view and facing the road rather than the sun.

But Richard was having none of the advice to flatten the old dump and build from scratch. "I don’t see a house as a disposable item," he says. "I’m English and in England houses grow over the centuries." Towers are not uncommon either. Fortunately architect Graham Lane, who lives just around the corner, was happy to go along with Richard’s conservation philosophy and with his desire for a tower to be attached to what would basically be "a simple, practical family house".

Graham saw that retaining the old house would help keep the project within budget. "The house is not perfect but it’s basically sound and they can always grow a coat of ivy or wisteria over it." But the major issue in the project was the engineering constraints of the site. "Restraints of location drove the substance of the design," says Graham.

"When you build a house out here you have to consider the exposed location and the need to retain existing vegetation, the requirement for six-metre-deep stability piles and retaining walls to support existing land forms, drainage, effluent disposal and a whole heap of issues which don’t apply elsewhere." Paramount among these was retention of the existing vegetation. The native plants – typical secondary-growth west-coast scrubland – grow right to the edge of the house and the architect manoeuvred the whole design around what the owner calls "a particularly straggly pohutukawa".

Muriwai builder Brian Muir, engineer Peter Deane and landscaper Delwyn Shepherd brought their local knowledge to the project and the result is a house with an old end and a new end and a nine-metre tower clad in tiles of brushed stainless steel. Each tile is on a 90-degree angle to its neighbour, creating a range of reflections. The tower appears to change colour depending on the weather and the time of day and the kaleidoscopic effect is continued at night with artificial lighting.

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