1985 Ross Jenner Remuera

An architect academic designs his own courtyard home with both views and introspection in mind.

- Simon Farrell-Green

At first blush, the house of Ross and Chris Jenner seems like a fancy or a folly, some kind of postmodern neo-classical in-joke. When it was built in 1985, it bore little resemblance to a New Zealand house – and even less resemblance to the vernacular tradition of small, timber buildings that had defined the country’s architecture for the previous four decades.

Thirty years on, its white plaster forms and layered interior spaces still seem somehow foreign, glamorous and deeply urbane: twin columns reach up through a double-height void and down to the ground floor below, marble tiles cover the floors, and the walls are painted chalky white. There are intricate marble ‘gargoyles’ to drain water from the tops of tall concrete walls, and tall concrete posts that reach to nowhere, like some reclaimed Roman ruin. The top of the garage is a pond, so that when you come down the driveway you’re presented not with a roof but a shallow pool of water that reflects the square front façade of the house. The round door handles open not against anything so prosaic as a door stop, but slip snugly into holes drilled into the walls behind them.

And yet, it’s so deeply pragmatic. Ross and Chris moved to Auckland in the early 1980s after travelling around Europe and a short period living with Ross’s parents in Dunedin. The Jenners senior followed shortly after, selling up in Dunedin and suggesting that the four of them build two houses on one site. They eventually found a steep bank of a site in Remuera with views out to Mount Wellington. “When I first looked at it I wondered how the hell you could even put one house on it, let alone two,” says Ross, an academic at the University of Auckland’s architecture school.