Figure Of Speech

A modern farmhouse on the harbour at Point Wells is designed around the collections of a lifetime and the rhythms of rural life.

- Simon Farrell-Green

The village of Point Wells is surrounded on three sides by water, across the Whangateau Harbour from the beach-side settlement of Omaha. It’s a sleepy, estuarine place: one road in, one road out; big trees, a store and some lovely chunks of tidal waterfront land. Twenty years ago, the owners of this new house, by Aaron Paterson, Dominic Glamuzina and Steven Lloyd, reluctantly sold their old house beside the estuary and moved to Omaha – much more attractive to their teenage kids at the time. They then spent two decades working out how to get back.

When they finally made it back across the causeway, it was for a different sort of occupation: a decidedly rural one. Having retired from full-time work in Auckland, they wanted to build a house that was part retreat, part permanent home – a modern farmhouse, complete with out-buildings and lots of room for people to stay. They planned an orchard, a cricket oval and a huge vegetable garden. It had to cope with one person in the middle of winter, or 20 in the height of summer. And it had to house a wonderful collection of art and artefacts gathered over a lifetime, including what you might call a cabinet of curiosities from around the world that takes in taxidermy, ethnic art and fertility symbols, which sit lightly next to art that includes several large works by Allan Maddox.

“They wanted a particular type of building. A gable. And that wasn’t something that we’d ever really done before,” says Paterson. The idea was a challenge for Glamuzina and Paterson, whose practice was known for darkly intelligent buildings and who, Lloyd included, have since gone on to their own practices. Through the design process, the architects came up with all sorts of ideas on how to tweak the classic rural vernacular: the owners were determined to have that gable, and in the most low-key, pared-back way possible.