You never forget your first child: months of preparation and speculation, the trauma of the birth, the beautiful reveal. For any architect, their first house project is pretty much the same. But Malcolm Taylor's first project - a remodel of a 1950s house which he carried with last year's NZ Institute of Architects' Gold Medal laureate, Pip Cheshire - turned out to be particularly memorable: it was for the parents of a cute young teacher he'd just met and was soon to marry.
Malcolm has overseen more stages of development on the house: a complete garden installation with landscape designer Trish Bartleet and a recent refurbishment of kitchen, bathrooms and decor. He remains excited about the house and his client, mother-in-law Brenda.
"Brenda has the courage, she's not afraid of colour. She's worked with Nanette Cameron and the Design Guild, so she completely got what we were doing with the whole post-modern, Memphis approach. Pip blew out the space, we detailed the bejesus out of it and Brenda went for the joyful colours," Malcolm recalls.
Malcolm's wife Tracey laughs that her dad's more modest brief was merely to get a decent garage he could drive into, as he couldn't get down the steep drive to a tiny 1950s space. That is now a deluxe ground floor workshop, sometimes used as a gym. While the architects delivered the requested smart double garage at the street level, it was the rest of the remodel that caused the excitement.
