Sometimes Randomness Can Be Way More Interesting

A challenging house above Matiatia has softened into the Waiheke Island landscape, without losing its edge.

- Henry Oliver

 Ten years ago, when this Waiheke house designed by Dominic Glamuzina was completed, a local man running for local council called it a “crime against humanity” on his campaign flyer. Waiheke residents can be critical of any new architecture on the island, betraying a tension between social progressivism and local conservatism. But few new buildings draw as much attention as those that sit on the hills over Matiatia, the bay where visitors get their first welcoming glimpse of the island and where locals come and go, some daily, on their way to and from the mainland.

On the ferry over to visit the house, I ask Glamuzina whether he was aware of the public nature of the houses viewable from the ferry and if he anticipated the criticism. “You have no way of not being aware,” he says. “I was coming here at least once a week while it was being built and it was pretty intense. But I got used to that awareness of doing something public. The fact that people love or hate it is great. I would sit at the back of the boat and occasionally talk to people about it, but I was never worried about whether they hated it.”

The house sits high on the crest of a large rural site, facing east towards Coromandel, north towards Rangitoto Island, and slightly west to downtown Auckland. Arriving by ferry, it’s seen to your right as you approach the terminal. From a distance it looks like a familiar modernist stack of boxes – glass on the bottom, some undefinable metal on top. Now that the house has settled into the landscape, it’s hard to imagine it raising anyone’s blood pressure. But, 10 years ago, the copper-cladding was bright and glistening and some residents saw it as ostentatious.