“A cheerful intervention on the main street of Palmerston North, this mixed-use development shows how successful the typology can be. Using standard commercial construction, all the spaces are just the right scale, while planted courtyards and communal areas between buildings trap the sun and create moments for repose.” — Te Rōpū
The Cafe de Paris Inn was founded in 1893 and stood on a prominent site on the corner of Main Street and Domain Street in Te Papaioea Palmerston North for 123 years. Originally across the road from the railway, it catered to the thirsty, the hungry and the sleepy – reviews later in its career commented on it being dated, but spotless – until it was irrevocably damaged by fire and demolished in 2016.
A small crowd gathered to witness its passing; one former patron took a brick as a souvenir. “It’s a very sad day,” she told Stuff. “Growing up in Palmy, all my life it was an icon. I bet those walls could tell a few stories.” At the time, Jemma Cheer and Adam Curry were living down the road in a 50-square-metre flat in a 1939 art deco building above Cheer’s eponymous graphic-design studio and 100 metres from Curry’s bike shop, Central Bicycle Studio. Loyal inner-city residents, they’re fervently committed to living in, and rejuvenating, this much-maligned city. “We lived in that apartment for 10 years,” says Cheer now, “so it was almost proof of concept. We kept saying, ‘We love this – we just wish we owned it.’”
Eventually, they set out to buy a small piece of land, a few hundred square metres, say, on which to build space for their two businesses and an apartment above. Quickly, they discovered those sites don’t exist in Palmy – but eventually, they got wind of the old Hotel de Paris site. By then, it had sat empty for five years and been through a number of owners, none of whom could make it work.
At 950 square metres, it was three times as big as Cheer and Curry wanted, but they went ahead anyway. As they engaged with a local commercial construction company and started to work out what to do with it, they realised they were out of their depth. “It was a penny-drop moment for us,” says Curry. “We realised we had no idea and we should do what we do in our own businesses, which is look for people to lead us.”
They were aware of the work of Tim Gittos and Caro Robertson, of Spacecraft Architects, via some old friends who’d built a house with them on a near-impossible site in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. When they got in touch, Gittos thought it was a scam. “The brief was just so perfect,” he says now. Continues Robertson: “There were so many exciting things about it. Mixed use is such a dream, but who ever builds it?”
The design Gittos and Robertson came up with was characteristically clear-eyed and straightforward, utilising bog-standard commercial construction: steel frame and timber-tray concrete floors, with precast concrete panels downstairs and corrugate upstairs. “We wanted to take advantage of the work they’d done so far,” says Gittos, “rather than send them back into residential building land.”
But where Cheer and Curry had asked for three spaces – studio, shop, apartment with garage – Spacecraft delivered them a masterplan for four buildings, stretching down the site. Low rise and brilliantly utilitarian, with alternating monopitch roofs, they contain a mix of commercial spaces and apartments. The buildings run roughly east to west, with courtyards between them that Gittos calls “s’up” space: natural moments to bump into people. “It’s a long, deep site, so if you covered the whole thing, you’d have interior space that wasn’t very nice,” he says. “By putting courtyards in, you create shelter from the wind and open the buildings to the north – and you create relationships between them.” It also meant they could stage the project, by picking off a building or two at a time.
The architects spent quite a bit of time playing with modules, working out how many buildings and how deep, before settling on four. The two they’ve built so far are a two-storey building for Curry’s bike shop on the Main Street side, which has an apartment above, and a one-storey building behind that contains Cheer’s design studio, a staff room and a large double garage. There are multiple access points through and around – straight into the bike shop or studio, through a gate into a courtyard; down a driveway and in through the garage.
Come along Main Street now, heading out of town from the city’s grassy square and brutalist central-city buildings, and things quickly get a bit daggy. Four lanes of traffic; the faded New Railway Hotel; light industrial buildings clad in corrugate. There are also big trees and a park that used to be the railway, and then, you catch site of Cheer and Curry’s optimistic compound. Downstairs is mostly glass, framed with dark-blue aluminium joinery and panels of precast concrete with exposed pebbles, a nod to the brutalist buildings along the road. Upstairs is clad in white corrugate, with white windows that have inset panels of bright yellow. It’s a beacon, a kind of renaissance for Palmy. “The building language is the same as a standard commercial building, but it has its own dignity,” says Robertson. “Everything is scaled right – we slotted things in where it made sense for the proportions.”
Up close, it’s open, casual. Out front, Curry’s bike shop is pleasantly busy – utilitarian, with a lot of bikes. Around the corner, there’s a tall steel-mesh fence – a late addition made in response to security issues in the compound. Beside that is Cheer’s studio, which has high ceilings and glass on three sides: eventually, it’ll look into green spaces in two directions. It’s here you start to see the joyful language of the place, which uses industrial materials in colourful ways, including steelwork painted a bright, primary blue, along with screens and balustrades constructed from bright yellow reinforced fibreglass mesh usually used for walkways in factories. “We just didn’t say no to anything,” says Cheer.
To get to their apartment, you cross the courtyard lined with grass pavers to a discreet glass door under an upper-level deck. The single piece of precast concrete was craned into place and acts as both deck for the apartment, and cover to the walkway between the buildings downstairs. You climb the stairs up into an airy, open space with white walls and that fantastic blue steelwork. Materials are hardwearing but colourful: cork floors, vinyl bathroom, Laminex kitchen.
You enter into the central dining space: there are two bedrooms on one side of it; kitchen, bathroom, laundry and den on the other. Outside, there’s that lovely deck looking down into the courtyards and out to the horizon. There’s an ease here, an unfussiness which is complemented beautifully by Cheer and Curry’s collections of furniture and art: remarkably, almost nothing was brought over from their previous apartment. Cheer is a big fan of the American interior designers Commune, who have furnished, among other things, a number of Ace Hotels. “We were trying to dissect why these spaces were cool and it’s because they all had their own character,” she says. “We love having this room for this function, and this room for this function. It meant we could make robust spaces and a den – somewhere to watch TV and hide away.”
The couple moved in over a few months in the middle of last year. The gardens have started to take off, providing much-needed green space in between the buildings and a buffer to neighbouring ones. Eventually, a climbing rātā will grow up the steel screen and gate, creating another courtyard, an intermediate space. “This is my first time working below home,” says Curry. “Even though the old shop was 100 metres from our flat, it felt like a thing to go home – and I like that that hasn’t changed. Stepping through that door feels different.”
Already, the expressions of interest are coming in for the next stages: a three-storey building with apartments, and a two-storey one with commercial spaces. So much so, they’re considering building them much sooner than they ever thought they would. So while the Café de Paris Inn might be long gone, these little buildings will continue to enliven a once-bustling corner of the city. “Adam and Jemma chose us on purpose, but the way they’ve riffed on the design and used it in their thinking is so wonderful,” says Robertson. “They’re not so serious, and they’re not scared. You have to be so brave with a project like this.”
