“An expansive rural home on an established site above Haumoana combines an elegant plan with exceptionally beautiful interior design. Eroded edges and a variety of courtyards create an intimate connection with the landscape. There’s an implied sense of history to this house – it already feels like it’s been there forever.” — Te Rōpū
It may seem strange, maybe even impertinent, to start a tour of a home this glorious in the kids’ wing, in the shower of all places. Yet this is no mere washroom. Stand within its tiled walls and your eyes are drawn upwards – to a towering four-metre-high light well that transforms it into something of an observatory. Perfect then for the resident 14-year-old. This shower is a sanctuary, a place to ponder, to gaze up at the Hawke’s Bay heavens – maybe even catch a Rocket Lab launch.
A strange place to start? Perhaps. But this shower of power tells you everything you need to know about this home: it’s full of unexpected moments, quiet beauty and spaces designed to be lived in, not just looked at. From the outside, Haumoana House, the family home of interior designer Amy Gillespie, doesn’t shout for attention. At the end of an olive-lined drive on a 10-acre plot, its approach is modest – no grand arches or gates. “John Scott was heavily in the brief,” Gillespie explains. “I love his houses – they feel like they belong to this region.” The entrance has Scott all over it: the front door could almost be mistaken for the back door. This isn’t a home built to impress the neighbours; it’s built to fit the land.
Then there’s the brickwork, central to the design. “I never explicitly asked Glamuzina Architects to use brick,” Gillespie continues, “but I hoped they would.” The pale bricks, with their natural, almost limestone hue, bring warmth and texture. Sourced from Belgium, they were essential for the handmade, earthy aesthetic she sought. Adding a personal layer to the story, Gillespie’s father – himself a bricklayer – laid many of the bricks for this home. “There’s a photo of him laying the last block,” she says. “He did so much work on this house. We had his 70th birthday here, with lights and candles, celebrating him and thanking him.” Whānau is built into these walls.
Inside, the house opens slowly. The design plays with levels, guiding you through spaces that rise and fall like you’re still outside. “I wanted curves and different levels,” Gillespie says. “Something that felt both modernist and natural: Palm Springs-y in a way, mixed with Japanese influences.” Architects Chris Smaill and Dominic Glamuzina interpreted her brief with aplomb. “It’s a mashup of a thousand influences,” Glamuzina jokes. “The carport entrance… almost Californian. There’s a touch of Alvar Aalto. And, of course, there’s John Scott and his legacy of amazing, amazing buildings. There’s this lineage of New Zealand architecture that’s been broken and people are just now rediscovering – asking for eaves and overhangs again. We’d forgotten we used to do that. It’s not celebrated enough, those moments where we had confidence in our architecture in New Zealand.”
Gillespie, who runs her own design studio, AG D., was more than just the client here – she shaped the home’s interior scheme. In the children’s wing, her touches stand out – built-in desks, oak window seats, perfect for Oscar, 14, and his sisters, Florence, 13, and Goldie, eight, to curl up with a book, chill or daydream. Family photos line the hallway – snapshots of cousins, siblings, parents and grandparents, alongside images of Gillespie’s wedding to Tim. The kids’ quarters are a favourite for the architects too: “I really like how the window seats turned out,” Smaill reflects. “It was a great collaboration with Amy – her ideas shaped this whole wing.” He chuckles as he recalls the visit of a deputation of NZIA judges earlier in the year. The kids were shooed off to their rooms, obligingly sitting on their bench seats with their books and iPads while the judges inspected. Perfect.
In the main living area, the house opens up fully, but never feels cavernous or cold. The sunken lounge, just a couple of steps down, lures you to its couches, while a second lounge looks out to the garden through large, floor-to-ceiling windows. Light dances through the space all day, shifting across the room. Outside, the landscaping feels like a natural extension of the home. The pool, sunken into the ground, is cleverly enclosed by a moat that reduces the height of the fence, so it seems to stretch endlessly to the Hawke’s Bay horizon. There’s a tennis court steps down from the house, and a putting green tucked away, allowing the family to indulge their Wimbledon and Augusta fantasies without cluttering the view. Xanthe White’s landscaping is as considered as the architecture; the native plants and subtle details make the house feel like it’s grown from the earth, not imposed upon it.
Now we head to another level. Up a few stairs, we come to the study – compact, quiet – and Gillespie and I Zoom the architects. “The house knew what it wanted to be,” Smaill reflects. “The brief, the landscape and the materials – they all seemed to align.” He pauses for a moment. “And the brick – it’s timeless. But it wasn’t until we saw it en masse that we knew what it would do texturally.” Gillespie smiles, remembering how her father made a miniature wall, wheel-barrowing it around the site to test how the bricks looked in different lights. “He was so meticulous,” she says.
Then there’s the main bedroom, a peaceful retreat on the upper level. “I didn’t want a top storey at all. I wanted the master bedroom on the ground floor, but Dom and Chris convinced me otherwise. It’s the best decision we made,” Gillespie confesses. “The master bedroom went for a ride,” Glamuzina adds. “It was on the east side, the west side, the front, the back. Eventually, it ended up upstairs, and that worked out beautifully.” Now, it feels like a retreat, where Gillespie and her husband can lie in bed and see nothing but the sky. There’s an ensuite up there too, another room you could lose hours inside. “We love a good bathroom,” Glamuzina says, laughing. “Why not have some joy there?”
And so, we return to where we began – back in a shower, this time upstairs. It’s exquisite, curbless, tiled, timeless. “I put in this little window on the side of the shower,” Gillespie points out. It frames a view past Haumoana village, past Black Bridge, past the vineyards and orchards that stretch to Napier, then all the way out to the Kaweka Range where the wind turbines slowly turn and which, just last week, saw a September dump of snow.
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