Curves, we are told, are making a comeback. In this remarkable 1970s Auckland house they never went out of style.
A curiously curvaceous 1970s home is reinterpreted by a couple with a passion for mid-century style
When Rachel Tomlinson first set eyes on her future home, she wasn’t at all sure she liked it. Viewed from the street, the 1970s house in Takapuna on Auckland’s North Shore seemed a little too unusual, a bit too different from its neighbours, especially the huge circular room at the front with its curvy yurt-like roof. Then when she and husband Murray stepped through the door, they realised the curviness didn’t stop there – and they loved it.
If you were to look at Google Maps, you’d see the whole house is shaped rather like half a doughnut: a long, curved double-brick wall wraps its arms around the entire dwelling, and a not-quitecircular swimming pool takes the spot where the doughnut’s hole would be.
Those curves, and those bricks, reminded Rachel of the Neville Price-designed house she’d grown up in nearby. And once you stepped up into that circular front room, it had a great feel.
Says Murray: “Everything looked solid and sound. The structure looked good. I liked the fact that it was wrapped around the pool. We both have an affinity for the mid-century, and it had that late 60s, early 70s look.”
All it needed, they reckoned, was a bit of attention. Murray especially was keen for a challenge. That was in 2013.
“It looked quite solvable but there was a lot more to it than we realised,” says Murray. >
They engaged Caaht Studio Architects and started renovating in 2015 and were mostly done within 18 months – although some finishing touches were still being completed as late as October 2018.
All but two of the original dozen interior walls were removed to make way for a radically different floorplan. During the planning, the couple discovered that there had originally been a 1970s-style conversation pit in the circular living room. They considered reinstating it, before deciding it would take up too much of the room’s footprint.
Concrete door frames were enlarged and replastered. Ceilings were lifted and all the window and door joinery was replaced. Extra rooms were added around the back, creating a partially self-contained hang-out for the older two of their three children William, 22, Ella, 20, and Lucy, 15. The poolside and gardens were also reinvented.
There were some serious cost blow-outs. And the Tomlinsons lived in the house throughout the renovation (although William was abroad for some of that time).
Remarkably, Murray and Rachel say they had no serious disagreements during the ambitious rebuild. “Houses are one thing we can agree on,” says Rachel. >
The house was built in 1973 and designed by architect Alwyn Gillam – not a name they’d come across before. And the original plans named the builder as Jan Verhaaren. They hadn’t heard of him, either, but halfway through the refurbishment Murray was working out the front when someone pulled up and parked in the driveway. It was the original builder, curious to see what was to become of a house that he’d put together long ago.
The house is on the strip of land sandwiched between Lake Pupuke and the Hauraki Gulf. The Tomlinsons used to live on the other side of the lake and when it came time to move, they narrowed their choices to just seven streets nearer to the sea.
Soon after they moved in, Rachel learned the house had something of a reputation locally. “We’d say we’d bought this house and people would say, ‘Oh, we used to go to parties there.’”
There’s something about the geometry of the place that makes it almost inevitable that you end up gravitating towards the pool. “You can see it would have been a party-around-the-pool place,” says Rachel.
Murray sells real estate for Barfoot & Thompson’s city commercial branch, which means he gets to see a lot of clever design in action and has picked up some tips that proved handy in this home. He points out the vertical steel fins cocooning the spiral staircase that leads down to the garage.
“I’ve always been interested in building, so we gave the architect a really detailed brief about what we wanted.”
Murray did the lighting plan for the entire house. He also took on much of the plastering and bagging of the brickwork, as well as wheelbarrowing vast quantities of rubble and clay from the rear of the tricky-to-access site. By the time they were done, more than 30 skips had been filled and removed.
“You can’t get a tradie at the drop of a hat, and for a lot of things you can’t get someone in to do just a day or two’s work. So I ended up doing quite a lot of that.”
The couple did the garden plan between them: Murray has a horticulture degree from Lincoln University and Rachel has a horiculture diploma from Massey. >
They planted everything from scratch, including quince, fig, feijoa, guava, orange, grapefruit and mandarin trees. “We try to keep the garden useful,” says Murray. “And these days it’s good to keep something for the bees to eat.”
All those curves made the refurbishment complicated. Cabinetry, pool paving and flooring had to be templated and specially cut to fit, driving up the quantity of materials used, the level of workmanship required and the amount of time taken. Rachel noticed that when she was deep in the renovations, and they were spending an awful lot of money (including a budget blowout on pool paving alone that ran into the tens of thousands of dollars) she went through a stage of finding it hard to enjoy the whole thing. But now everything’s in place, it’s time for a breather. “It’s finally finished and we can just enjoy it.”
There is something a little magical about living in a house that doesn’t believe in straight lines.
“It’s all about that curved back wall,” says Murray. “Every time you walk around, you can’t quite see all the way, what’s in front of you. From one end to the other, you go through 90 degrees of directional change, but you don’t know you’re doing it.
“It’s a really nice feeling just taking that little journey every time you walk down the hallway.”