“The result of several years of hard yakka by its architect owner, Walker Box is the distillation of influences too numerous to articulate into something that feels cohesive and singular. A three-storey tower provides enlivened spaces and a multitude of experiences that bely its tiny footprint.” — Te Rōpū
In 1994, Lewis E Martin published a lovely book called Vivid Building: Drawings of the Architecture of Ian Athfield and Roger Walker. Martin was a retired architect, and his pencil drawings are delightful – one man’s enthusiasm, presented in print. It somehow captures the sheer unmediated joy of these houses, designed by two anarchic architects and featuring work from the 1960s to the 1980s.
When architect Micah Rickards was 11, a family friend gave him his own copy, and not long after that, he and his father Geoff started exploring Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington on excursions they called Walkering, searching out houses from the book. Micah the younger, quite precociously, even managed to talk his way into Athfield’s Te Mata Estate on a family trip to Hawke’s Bay. “I didn’t think it was instrumental in my becoming an architect until quite recently,” he says.
And while it’s not overt, the minute home Micah designed on a 12x12-metre piece of south-facing hill in Brooklyn carries something of the spirit of the Athfield-Walker era – a sense of fun, for a start, as well as a sense of contingency or whimsy. It doesn’t have the more extravagant visual touches, but it does have the same modest planning and dramatic internal spaces, despite its quite austere façade.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Back in 2017, Micah started talking with dear friends about the possibility of going in together on a property. His friends wanted to buy a house, and Micah would arrange for a small piece of the section to be subdivided, thereby reducing his friends’ mortgage and gaining access to land on which to build himself a home. “We looked at one house very loosely,” he says, “and then they just went ahead and bought this one. But I realised immediately I could do something with it.”
As mentioned, the site is in Brooklyn – a sloping section with a big old bungalow at the top, connecting to a flat, north-facing garden. On the street, facing south, was a rotten old concrete garage of a type that anyone with even a vague knowledge of Wellington’s inner suburbs will recognise. Built into the hill, often damp and poorly waterproofed, they are rarely big enough to hold a modern vehicle. But this one overlooks a pretty valley, and it’s incredibly sheltered – south-facing, yes, but tucked right out of the wind.
It took two years, but Micah was able to show that he could create a compliant building in place of the garage. “A very marginal compliant dwelling, to be honest,” he says. In essence, he bought the whole front of the section, then carved out an easement for a carpark and entry paths for the house behind, retaining the airspace above – it’s kind of like an apartment carpark in this regard, and allows for future development if he ever wants to make the house bigger. He was helped by Wellington City Council’s permissive plan for subdivision, which doesn’t have a minimum lot size, so long as a series of conditions can be met. “It was just trying to be pragmatic about using a garage footprint and keeping it tight, designing the smallest possible thing,” he says.
From there, Micah freely admits he went around in circles for a while. Early sketches were very Walkery; later ones were much more restrained. “The design process was all over the show, to be honest,” he says. “I didn’t know if it was going to be restrained and minimal or earthy and wooden.”
He got one plan consented with a pyramid roof and straight sides, but that felt too safe, so eventually, he returned to his original ideas, drawing very lightly on the spirit of Walker and Athfield to create a tall tower with three levels connected by a spiral staircase. There are lots of solid walls for privacy, with carefully placed windows punched in the façade, which adds to its intrigue: you can’t quite tell how many levels it is. It was always going to have a concrete base, but his engineer suggested he make the whole thing from concrete block – it’s economical, straightforward and meant reducing the number of trades involved.
At ground level, he designed a one-car garage – as demanded by the council – which has never had a car in it:
instead, it’s what you might call a non-specific space. Used by his partner Ivan as a hairdressing studio, it’s also a yoga room and there’s a piano in here too – one day, Micah thinks, he might open it all up and have a street concert. On the middle level, there’s an open-plan bedroom and tiny bathroom. Carry on up the stairs and you get to the open-plan living area with its long kitchen bench and floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that flood the place with light and lead out to a sunny north-facing deck.
What makes it even more delightful is the way the spaces interact via a series of voids and openings that funnel light through the building: there’s a double-height space above the ground level, which opens into the middle floor; a big square window drops light into the space. There’s no door on the bedroom – just a curtain, if it’s needed. After struggling with the middle-floor plan, Micah realised he could push the bathroom into the void a bit, and put the hand basin on the landing, thereby shrinking the bathroom and making the bedroom bigger. “The void is about making downstairs useable,” he says. “It’s always got a nice soft light in there – it kind of feels like a basement but with a different light.”
Originally, the place was meant to be quite raw – unpainted concrete block, galvanised downpipes and a galvanised staircase. But despite his best intentions, Micah kept coming back to something fun. You get the sense that every time he sat down to draw something, it involved colour and circles and quirk. The roof, for instance, drains to a delightful tray, which then empties into a very graphic downpipe. (Athfield would approve.) It made sense to paint the block rather than seal it, so the tower became a crisp shade of white, apart from a couple of raw corners that remind you it’s concrete. To this, he added pops of colour – yellow, red and blue. Then a friend insisted the staircase should be red; the inside of the skylight soon followed, as did a graphic treatment on the front door to double as the house number.
Micah had just enough budget to get the place watertight – walls, floors, blockwork, roof and windows – but he didn’t have the budget for it to be finished. So, in a return to their days of Walkering, Micah and his 80-something dad Geoff finished the place off, using a commercial system of steel battens on the inside of the walls, insulating, and lining with plasterboard. “Dad was incredible, he’s way more handy than me,” says Micah. “I’d come home from work and he’d have devised a lever system to get three-metre sheets of plasterboard up to the top floor – crazy bits of timber with lever arms.”
Just after they finished this stage of work, Micah got very sick: after a period in hospital, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which meant pausing work on the house for a while to focus on his health. After three months off – during which his colleagues from Patchwork Architecture laid the back deck over a weekend – work on the house continued, albeit at a much slower pace, one small job a weekend, until he finished it earlier this year.
Seven years after starting the conversation and five years after designing the house, he gets to enjoy it and its myriad little moments – not to mention having best friends next door. “It’s really nice sitting up the top and looking down the valley over the street,” he says. “It feels like a lookout tower.”
