A utilitarian shell is given life with a distinctive colour palette which shows that a sensitive approach to landscape doesn’t mean dull. Courtyards on all sides connect with a beautiful garden, while interior spaces feature diagonal views through the building, easy circulation and bespoke cabinetry. A warm, thoughtful home with a sense of joy.” — Te Rōpū
As its name suggests, Verdant House is a house in a garden in Wānaka, Central Otago. Owned by artist Katherine Throne and her husband Craig, the clients had a strong idea, but not a prescriptive brief, for the house and detached studio: she wanted to live and work in a place that fed her art. “We wanted buildings that were grounded in the landscape, creative and small, not wasteful, and with a natural-world feel,” she says. “The house would be smothered in plants. It would be part of the landscape.”
The result is a three-part composition of family home, artist’s studio and carport, which was completed in mid-2022. The buildings are placed at some remove from each other on a 4000-square-metre section, with the spaces in between taken up by Throne’s garden, a wild area of native plants and flowering perennials.
Pac Studio and Steven Lloyd Architecture describe the site as “peri-urban”. It’s part of a subdivision, but distinguished by its size and privileged by its location at the development’s edge. The elevated site was previously bare, of buildings, that is: two thirds were tussock, and the remainder had been planted in Douglas firs, which were retained as a shelter belt.
Throne has familial connections to Wānaka. She and her husband Craig bought their section in 2020. The couple, who have two young daughters, had spent nearly a decade in the United States. They lived in Grand Rapids, an old industrial city in Michigan that was a centre of furniture manufacture and is now a creative design hub. While living in Grand Rapids, Throne attended the city’s Kendall College of Art and Design, gaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in painting and minoring in interior design, before embarking on a Master of Art, which she ultimately finished at Elam, back in New Zealand. Her art practice, in particular, and the classic 20th-century pieces of furniture the couple collected in Michigan, were influences on the planning and programming here. Her work is loose, gestural – and colourful. “My practice is motivated by celebrating what the flower represents to me,” she says, “the powerful, the beautiful and our connection to the earth.”
As well as being design-literate, Throne was building-aware. Her father was a building practitioner and academic. “I grew up around the building industry,” she says. After doing comparative research on various architecture practices, the Thrones contacted Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland-based Pac Studio. Throne was familiar with the practice’s award-winning work, and Pac’s Sarosh Mulla had the answers Throne wanted to hear. “He said, ‘We do all sorts of things – we don’t have a particular look.’ I liked that. I didn’t want an architectural signature on our house.”
What came next was the Pac “deep dive”. This involves teasing out client requirements, preferences and aversions by way of a free-ranging questionnaire. Pac’s Rory Kofoed describes it as a “psychological document”. The “deep dive” process is “intentionally discursive”, Lloyd says. “We ask open questions about how the clients live,” Kofoed adds. “There’s an honesty in unfiltered answers. It’s a very useful document – we keep coming back to it during a project.”
“Pac’s questions were very evocative,” Throne says. “For example, one might be, ‘It’s a summer Saturday afternoon, and you’re looking out of the house – what do you see, what do you hear? The questions allowed me to paint a picture of how we live.” As well, she says, clients and architects shared “loads of images of buildings, landscapes and gardens”.
The house sits at the centre of the section, separated from Throne’s painting studio by a planted bund made with earth from groundwork excavations. In contrast to the garden the 150-square-metre home is based in order. The architects cite the dictum of Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf that “the idea is not to copy nature but to give a feeling of nature”. The house plan is essentially a square grid of three rows of three spaces. But there is a Jenga-like twist to the nine-square arrangement, a subtle disruption of the grid. The bedroom row is shunted to the west, the living row to the east, and in the north-east corner, a square has been surrendered to open space. This allows for the eastern courtyard at the heart of the plan, and the north-east terrace that connects to the kitchen, dining and living areas. The house’s folded roof planes, which admit light into the building, also offset the design’s cubic concept.
“The clients had quite a lot of mid-century furniture that had to be accommodated in the house, but it was easy to find places for the pieces,” Kofoed says. In fact, he adds, “We were able to take a thread from their collection – it gave us an aesthetic to build upon.” It was not a matter of copying a style, he says, but of connecting to a modernist tradition which, in the New Zealand context, is firmly associated with Christchurch architects such as Miles Warren and Peter Beaven. Here, the concrete blocks, ply walls, steel roofs and clay tiles speak a language that would have been readily understood by our mid-century masters.
Perhaps they might even have wished they could swap their austere colour palette for Verdant House’s red roofs, and warm green and luminous yellow interiors. “My art practice drove the painterly aesthetic we were after, with the interplay of colour, texture and light being crucial considerations,” says Throne. “The brutish masculine exterior presented a chance for contradiction, achieved through a palette of warm earthy paint colours inside that bleed into a swathe of similar toned soft planting outside.”
Although the clients, architects and builder Mike Plimmer were clearly on the same page, they did confront some unforeseen challenges. Design and construction happened during the Covid period, which was characterised by, among other things, difficulties with the sourcing and delivery of building materials. In addition, the architects were not able to make as many site visits as they wished. Things got sorted, though, including a crucial extension to the roof over the deck off the living and dining areas – “our main living space”, says Throne. “Now, it’s absolutely perfect.”
Two years on, the project feels finished by the garden, which Throne has been working on for several years – she started before the house was complete – and the planting now comes right up to the edge of the house. A few more years, and it will indeed have achieved her goal of being smothered with plants. “We feel very cocooned,” she says, “sitting here looking out to the mountains.”
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