No-frills house draws high-profile architect

Sky Tower designer Gordon Moller has set his sights closer to street level. MICHELE HEWITSON looks at his plans to bring state housing into the 21st century.

No 4 Nissan Place, Onehunga, has that slightly mournful air a house gets when nobody's called it home for a while. You can tell that people who cared about it once lived here: there is a row of busy lizzies in the front garden, a few taro plants in the back.

Take your eye off nature and it tends to move in. The weeds are taking over, the grass is calf-high and growing. There are other signs of human habitation: an old bathtub filled with water, a forgotten soccer ball. And some well-gnawed bones discarded by a dog.

Gordon Moller doesn't see this. When the Auckland architect - who is probably best known for designing the Sky Tower - looks at such a house he sees something quite different.

He sees possibilities. He's not concerned about the sticky paspalum grass seed or other deposits adhering to his well-pressed trousers. He'd rather you looked in through the windows of this modest 1950s state house and saw the heart rimu floors and the windows. "Fifty years old," he enthuses. "I've been through the house and every window opened."

He's a man with a plan. Literally. Moller is standing in the backyard with a clutch of drawings in his hand.

Moller is part of a steering committee which, through an alliance between the New Zealand Institute of Architects and Housing New Zealand, is helping to redesign state houses for the 21st century - and for urgently needed housing for large families.

The plans for No 4, number eight off the drawing board, are the result of collaborative discussions with other Auckland architects Marshall Cook and Patrick Clifford. Moller estimates that there will eventually be around 40 such standard designs able to be applied to different styles of state housing. In other parts of the country other architects are involved in this project, dubbed Healthy Housing.

For Moller, the principles involved in designing a city tower which caters to around 700,000 visitors a year, and a state house which might have 10 people living in it, are exactly the same. "You define what the needs are. It's the same thing if you design a house or a factory or a carparking building."

The needs have been defined, building will begin in the next three weeks (the work will be carried out by other architects who have come on board.) The plans show the house will be expanded from an original floor size of around 100 sq m to half that again. Its kitchen and bathroom will be completely refurbished and another bathroom added. It will have five bedrooms where it now has three. The living area will be extended.

A large deck will feature in the northern corner of the overgrown backyard we're standing in. It will open off one of the bedrooms and off a widened hall where, Moller envisages, children can play on a rainy day. Or where there's enough room to put down a mattress if visitors arrive.

The extension will be in keeping with the style of the original house. It's about respecting the past - and state housing is part of our architectural heritage; they were originally architecturally designed - without building something new that looks old, Moller says.

You get to Nissan Place through State Ave, down streets of period state housing: good solid, no-frills structures. Flick through the Craig Craig Moller brochure and there are lists of NZIA awards for excellence in architecture. There are pictures of contemporary office suites, an apartment building overhanging Oriental Bay in Wellington, a coastal house with a covered pool and an atrium.

I can hear him groaning. Because "I don't," he said earlier, "want this to be a story about a flash architect dabbling in state housing. We're trying to do some good here."

So let's point out that the brochure also includes designs for a hospice and the Ronald McDonald House in Wellington. That Moller, like all the architects involved, is doing this work gratis. And that he happens to be an architect who adores designing factories.

Still, he jokes that his son Craig who, along with daughter Jodie works for Craig Craig Moller, gets to do the "flash house. I'm relegated to state housing."

You can tell that he does not regard this as a hardship. He talks about No 4 with as much enthusiasm as he does about, say, The Point apartments in the Viaduct Basin, which he designed and where he now lives.

He was 10 when he first picked up a pencil and started designing houses. Now, at 60, he remains as passionate - and as outspoken - about architecture.

He said Andrew Krukziener's Metropolis was "a bit out of date - not particularly well proportioned." But, because Moller is outspoken and decent, he took the sting out of the tail by saying: "But he brings a sense of quality."

Talking of grand architectural schemes, you still might think that for the man who built what has become a city icon and who last week returned from Macau where Craig Craig Moller is constructing another, slightly taller tower, state housing might lack a little in the drama stakes.

What he's really doing is fixing up other people's bad design decisions, isn't he?

He doesn't look at it that way. "It's just a matter of applying today's thinking to something that's now 50 years old. Maybe that was the way people thought at the time." By "at the time" he means the 40s and 50s, the decades he grew up in. Decades that, he says, "were incredibly conservative. People lived in a very closed sort of society and I think the houses reflected that."

We take it for granted now, says Moller, that a French door is not much more expensive than a window. "Because we're now thinking very strongly about how we relate to the outside. There ought to be a seamless relationship between inside and outside." Particularly, he stresses, in a city such as Auckland where you can live outside for much of the year. Moller would rather see steps on decks than balustrades. You can sit on a step with your tea on your knee, he says. And many people, he points out, may not be able to afford deck chairs and tables.

There is one other reason that outside living was a rare design feature in earlier Auckland houses. There's very little flat land, Moller says. "So you end up with a house which was close to the ground on one side and one-and-a-half metres above on the other. So to be able to open a French door you'd have to be able to build a deck. And quite often people couldn't afford decks."

He's not, is he, proposing that state houses should, God forbid, incorporate luxury items? The man is obviously a dangerous radical. He's also suggesting that more than one towel rail - in fact, a ladder of towel rails - might be a good idea in the bathrooms of these houses.

The people who move into No 4 might be impressed by their beautiful deck and functional bathroom. It's unlikely they'll be all that impressed by the fact they're living in a Moller-designed abode.

"They won't know," he says dismissively. "It's irrelevant."

Last time Moller was at Number 4, a neighbour called out from across the back fence. Did Moller, he wanted to know, ever do private houses?

Well, maybe just occasionally. In a modest sort of way.