SCHOOL ZONES:
Waimauku School, Massey High School.
CONTACT:
Bridget Dickson, 021 616 017.
AUCTION:
March 15.
Undulating bare land, the perfect new-home building site and a private, water's edge picnic spot got builder Andrew Grigg thinking not about a new home, but rebuilding an old barn.
To be clear, there was no barn here to be rebuilt. Rather, it was the rugged, lived-in scale of a lofty old barn bringing rough-sawn texture and history into the landscape that most intrigued him.
As Andrew and his wife Michelle played with spaces and design lines, they wanted to bring together the best architectural elements of their former bungalow - which had been a long renovation project - and their love for modern, open plan family living and entertainment spaces.
From countless conversations, they distilled their vision for their fictitious barn right down to the basics and came up with a standard against which every choice of material had to pass muster.
Neither wanted a cookie-cutter house or anything too easily identifiable as having been built in a particular era.
This was never going to be a 2010s-decade house even though it was built in 2015 and completed 18 months later.
"When we were trying to make decisions we'd always come back to the mindset: 'Could you have used something like this in an old barn?' or 'Would you find something like this in a barn'?" says Andrew.
The bungalow influences extend from the architraves and the deep skirting boards to the height.
Here they've brought lofty into the equation with a 2.7m-plus stud height, 2.2m high doors and the 1.4m to 1.5m wide hallway. Rough-sawn timber includes the macrocarpa pergola and entrance.
Inside it is Andrew's choice of top-grade pine without knots for the planks in the pitched ceiling and on the feature wall of their master bedroom that has a lime-washed decorative finish.
"I knew the process the timber went through and I knew what part of the process to extract it from before it was run into skirting boards.
Most rough-sawn timber is used outside," he says. Further consideration went into securing the continuous lengths needed to give the exterior gable ends of the house a clean, streamlined effect.
104 Foster Road, Kumeu. Photo / Supplied
Inside, Andrew and Michelle chose aged Northland swamp totara for their lounge feature wall and the breakfast bar.
The unusual pattern on the milled planks came about from the effect of running water through the submerged log and its effect is exactly what they wanted here, says Andrew.
In the kitchen they have further played up the barn vibe with plank-style splashback tiles that resemble creosote-coated cedar weatherboards of past years.
Meanwhile, the counterpoint is in the soft marble-look engineered stone bench and their choice of a fine grind "salt and pepper" effect to their in situ concrete floors.
Thermal mass properties and durability vindicated their decision to choose concrete instead of wood.
"We didn't want wooden floors because we didn't want anything too precious," says Andrew.
