Architect Claude Megson talked about the "great-souled house." A house not just to park oneself in, but a universe we construct for ourselves.
Perhaps his best example -- his own second-favourite (after his own house) -- is the Norris House in Remuera.
And it's for sale ...
Way back in 1965 when a young Claude Megson was still finding his architectural feet, he was commissioned by the Joplings to design a small family home in St Heliers.The NZIA’s Megson Guide takes up the story:
Standing on a sheltered back site on Achilles Point, this house won a NZIA Branch Award in 1965. The building is composed of “units” of timber-framed walls of various lengths with a return at each end. Separated from each other by full-height windows or doors, these repeated elements are deployed to create spaces with different orientations and varying qualities of enclosure and interconnection. The original landscaping included pebble gardens and fishpond which allowed the volumes of the house to “float” above the site.
With several large additions at the front (large garage and a closed-in carport) that small home is now a large home, and the oiled cedar cladding has been painted over, but the small jewel Megson created is still to be found there behind it all, and in almost original form thanks to the current owners, Ruth and Duncan Ormond, who [ as the Herald explains] have done much to bring it back from the state in which they found it.
When Ruth was in her teens, she had the chance to look through a new cedar-clad home designed by Claude Megson and built in 1965.
This is that house. Built for the Jopling family on a sheltered back section, it was Megson's second residential commission..
From time to time Ruth always thought it'd be great to live in that house and some 30 years on from that first viewing, Ruth and Duncan learned the house was for sale….
The Ormonds have [now] lived here almost half the life-time of this house and they have decided to hand its place in architectural history over to another family.
It goes to auction today – when hopefully another family will be able to enjoy what remains of Megson’s creation, which is a great deal, with many of the features already there in this house that were to become so much a part of his work.
"It's like a Lego home but you can look right through the house from one end to the other wherever you are standing," says Ruth.
Original features include exposed timber beams, built-in furniture and shelving and the circular moulded door handles.
Those built-in modules allowing a more direct relationship with the garden; the artful yet effortless-feeling negative detailing; the shafts of space through the interlocking parts of the house – open space contrasting dramatically with sheltering -- were to become a Megson trademark, making even the smallest of homes feel large-souled.
That’s how we felt when we visited over the weekend: the house, like our visits to all Megson’s houses, with their simple ingredients so carefuly arranged to create a home for the human soul, never failing to lift our spirits.
Almost impossible to describe in a photograph, the most successful of the spaces in this early home is his double-height dining room with built-in servery and direct garden access, a space whose essence Megson says is celebration, containing in this very early example the seed germ of everything that was to come in his later work. It is a delightful space to be in.
[Cross-posted at the Claude Megson Blog. Pics from PC, Herald, and Ray White Real Estate]
I’ve posted some of its beautiful Megson neighbours before (3/64, 54), and now that it’s on the market you can explore the inside of this smaller one-bedroom Megson townhouse/apartment that can still boast a mostly-original interior.
This is one of those very small places that genius makes appear large (even though the furniture arrangement shown has confused lounge and dining spaces): simple things like viewshafts front to back, borrowed scenery, full-height French doors, exposed rafters, subtle changes in level and height, cunningly-placed storage, all-day sun through the lantern over the central dining space, overlapping and nested spaces etc. All very thoughtfuly done, and very efffective indeed at turning a small jewel into what feels like a large-souled space.
Megson used to talk about a house being something you would sometimes want to wrap around yourself like a cloak, and other times just disappear. This small place fits the bill.
NB: If you’re keen to experience it properly, in the flesh,, there are Open Homes this Saturday and Sunday avo.
[Pics by Ray White Real Estate. Cross-posted at the Claude Megson Blog]
Not exactly a Claude Megson house any more – though it does retain something of the floor plan, some of the character, and nearly all of the glorious setting…
The original house was commissioned from Megson by Michael Hill, a Whangarei jeweller – but the fire that destroyed the house helped make him Michael Hil Jeweller. “It made me realise I'd been playing life too safe,” says Hill now.
So what actually happened was of course we built a beautiful home in Whangarei… we got Claude Megson, who is now the guru of architecture probably of New Zealand, looking back on some of those old drawings, and he had the most magnificent plan, the hexagonal house. And it was supposed to take nine months to build, and Claude is artistic and had no idea about costs and it just blew completely out. So it took two and a half years to build and it was very, very tough but it was quite a masterpiece actually, and in fact there was lots of similarity with [my current home]except it was in a hexagonal pattern. It was well beyond our means, but we completed it, and it was really for a gold medal for New Zealand. Claude was going to get a gold medal …
And we went to the pictures one night, and of course came out and Christine answered the telephone and Mr Strongman from along the road, was the one that called and saying, “Mrs Hill, I don’t know how to tell you this, but your house is on fire.” And I’ll never forget that night. We got into Christine’s Mini and roared along the road …and we’d turned round the corner and there right across, about a mile across the bay, in the bush you could see all the windows were orange and there were big flames. They were licking about 60 foot above. The house was just an explosion of flames and I realised it was all over.
And that night as I drove towards that fire, it was the night I made the decision that I had to buy my uncle out, which I did.
The house seen here is the house resurrected years later from that fire – and is now for sale!. The estate agent’s site (from whom these photographs have been gratefully taken) says
Over time and between 2008 and 2011, the house has gone through major rebuild and modernisation, keeping the integrity of the designer and staying true to the original design concept of the modular hexagonal rooms. This masterpiece is a combination of intimate inter-related spaces, planned with family use in mind.
That certainly describes what Megson had in mind.
The original three-zoned house was designed to sit, not in the middle of the site as would have been so common, but around the edges of the site to best capture the views, embrace the site, and keep the larger expanse open for play. ( I seem to recall plans showing the pool and house at different corners of the site, with the walk between them along the sote boundary, looking out over the harbour.)
The hexagonal geometry of the house was an organic development from site and programme.
This site diagram, based on notes I made in a lecture on the house Claude delivered in 1988, helps explain the concept:
Click here to take Bayleys's 3D tour through the house.
[Cross-posted at the Claude Megson Blog.]
Architect Claude Megson would have been incensed to feature so far down Home & Buiding magazines presentation of the “50 best New Zealand house designed [last] century.” (Particularly as David Mitchell’s Gibb House, a commission Claude coveted – and about which he would tell many stories -- features at number 2!)
Considered a New Romantic rather than a modernist, the house chosen by the magazine to represent Claude is his gold-medal winning Wong House, of which a small taste can be seen here.
The Auckland Architecture Archive’s handy Megson Guide has (very) slightly more:
[.[Cross-posted at the Claude Megson Blog]
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Architecture [they say] begins with the five senses, plus other (sub-senses) like those to do with temperature, humidity, air movement across the skin, and especially the kinaesthetic or haptic; the senses must come first!The point here is that all architecture begins with you – it doesn’t begin with some gods-eye view from above, or from some arid analysis of string-courses and pendentives. It starts from the point of view of the observer, of the person experiencing the whole ensemble---it starts there, and it radiates out1.
Next, These sensations must be integrated into patterns i) of day-to day life – entering the house, engaging in conversation, cooking, eating, watching television, bathing, lying in bed – and ii)of integration with the wider world with the perceiver at the centre – detailed and complex recognition of siting, eye lines into the distant ( and close) landscape.
Of harbour, valley and hilltop (each with their own resonance for us) and even the gradual exclusion of the public realm (“this is our space”) down to individual realms (“this is my space”).
Architecture recognises and builds in all these patterns or rituals – try and identify them in the place you’re in now, and think too about that special place from childhood and see how its patterns go together, and if they played some part in making it special for you.
Built in Auckland’s Meadowbank back in 1972, the Barr House – on a small suburban site embracing a bush reserve – is described by Megson biographer Giles Reid as one of the finest spaces he has ever been in. Yet, astonishingly, up until now it has been all but unpublished.
If there is a reason for this omission [says Reid], it is not due to the building’s lack of importance. The Barr House represents a huge advance in [Megson’s] ability to conceive and manipulate space. Of all [Megson’s houses discussed in Reid’s monograph], its spaces and forms are by far the most memorable.
The design of the house, as Megson virtually described it to an interviewer in the year of its birth, “takes its shape from the relation to the bush and the fan-shaped section.”
The clients approached the School of Architecture in 1971 asking for the best architect they knew. The name they kept hearing was Claude Megson.
The client wanted a house that would be, as it were, a work of art [recounts Megson’s 1971 interviewer Winifred Wilson]. He wanted something good, yet out of the ordinary, and it was to be a reasonably quiet house in which to live. The site, at the end of a cul-de-sac, overlooks the bush basin . . .
Colours, too, relate to the bush background. Basically, the house … built along the edge of this bush, forms a crescent around a large walled entry court.
From here one goes up to the bedrooms or down to the living quarters. It [is clad] in cedar boards … [originally] oiled a yellow brown, with solid piers in reinforced brickwork of a rich warm brown. The motor court and garden walls are also done in this warm brick work.
Inside, the brick walls are left exposed and the timber walls are lined with the same cedar boards … The high ceilings on the first floor are white plaster plainted white. The timber floors are covered in shag pile buff carpet and the whole house has a warm mellow glow of honey gold.
Having just spent a few days there, I can attest to the ingenious treatment of space Reid describes, powerfully assisted by the rhombic geometry suggested by the site.
As with the hexagonal design module used so deftly by Frank Lloyd Wright in his Hannah House, for example, the rhombic geometry opens up the house and gives a much greater feeling of freedom—movement systems and vision for example being on different paths, a feeling enhanced by the shafts of space shooting “laser like” from one side of the house to another.
Standing in the living room [for example, writes Reid,] one can see past the entry, across the stairs, just missing the back of the kitchen, through the family space and then breakfast area and out to the terraces beyond. Every plane seems to fold away from this invisible line with only moments to spare.
It is a wonderful house to visit—and still owned by the owners who originally commissioned it back in 1971; now reluctantly ready to sell after enjoying half a lifetime inhabiting the house.
They have nothing but praise for the house and the man who designed it for them. They would change nothing they say, and from the time the house came in under budget (costing less per square foot than state houses did at the time, reports the owner) to now when old age means they finally have to leave, they say they have loved every moment of living there.
[Photos by Barfoots, courtesy Philip Oldham. Plans from Building Progress magazine, 1972. Cross-posted at the Claude Megson blog]
If we’re going to make “a home for man,” as we talked about in Part One, we need to know why man needs a home. And to answer that there’s a more fundamental question we have to address first . . .
* * * *
Part 2: What is a Man?
Hamlet: What is a man?
If the chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
~ William Shakespeare
LET’S BEGIN TO ANSWER our two questions – what is man, and what it means to make a home for him -- by looking at two very special spaces which will help us get a grip on what sort of people we human beings are, and what ‘home’ means to man: two dining rooms (pictured below) created by Frank Lloyd Wright, one in 1902 for Susan Lawrence Dana, and the other in 1941 for an un-built project. Each one creates a space for people to celebrate the event of dining together, because for humans the act of dining together is something to celebrate. Not just time for a feed, but a stop, a reward for succeeding at the job of existence.
Wild animals hunt down their food and eat it raw. A lion rips the innards out of a lesser beast and eats it while the blood is still warm, and the heart still beating. A hyena finds the windfall and tears the remaining flesh from the bones, and vultures fortunate enough to discover the remains pick over what’s left.
Not us. That’s the way of the beast. We’re animals, true, but we’re rational animals. Our enormous brains have enabled us to succeed at life, to plan ahead, to flourish and to celebrate our successes. If the chief good and market of our time be but to sleep and feed, then we truly are no more than a beast. But we don’t just do this. We don’t just gnaw on a raw bone then fall asleep in a darkened cave: we sleep in comfort and we eat gloriously prepared food in the most elegant surroundings we can manage with the people we like and admire, and we celebrate we can do that by building into our homes this important ritual –this occasion.
In this sense, a dining space is not just a place to eat and be fed; it is the place in which we mark the occasion of dining – a place in which we share in goodwill the goods of the world together; where we mark the occasion of coming together, of our celebratory. Understood this way, as architect Claude Megson explained, the one-word essence of our dining space is: Celebration.
In a very concrete way then, architecture is simply built-in ritual, making a special place to host each of our special occasions.
From man’s earliest days, we’ve marked the things of importance to us with our rituals. The ritual of saying Grace at dinners has a good secular reason, a pause for thanksgiving, a moment in which to reflect on our success in providing for ourselves.
Man raises himself above bestiality partly by a simple elegance that speaks to who we are and what we need, and partly by marking these regular rituals as something life-sustaining. As architect Claude Megson used to say (echoing Aldo Van Eyck),
whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more. For space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion. ... We are not building buildings, we are building ritual, building occasion, building life itself.
If you’re a Frank Lloyd Wright, then you do it in a particularly life-enhancing manner.
Frank Lloyd Wright: Dining space, Susan Lawrence Dana House, Chicago - 1902
Note for example those two very different dining areas by Wright, above and below. Study them, and try and imagine yourself there—how it might feel to be there. Note for instance the lighting fixtures, the high-back chairs and the moulding lines, all of which help to contain the seating group and also to bring the focus of the diners’ attention down to the group, making it a smaller, cosier space but still part of a much larger space in which the diners are framed by the seating, and their faces lit up by the lighting fixtures to become the centre of interest that they should be in such a gathering.
Frank Lloyd Wright: ‘Sijistan’ Project, 1941
The vaulted ceilings contain, gathering without overpowering – like a tent canopy above – giving a very human scale to what is quite a large ensemble. Warm colours and special detailing massage the space to fit the occasion – offering the sense of a group that is gathering together to celebrate their own efficacy, the bounty they have produced, and their joy in each other’s company. In short: a celebration of thanksgiving – every day.
“ARCHITECTURE,” AS FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT SAID, “makes human life more natural, and nature more humane.” And THAT is the starting point of understanding the meaning of architecture: that it’s about life – human life – in ALL its forms – literally all of its forms – and the job of architecture is to keep us connected to what’s important in our lives; celebrating our important occasions; making the most of the material the earth provides in all its forms, and at the same time mediating, excluding and shutting out that which isn’t wanted.
Hamlet’s question above affirms for himself that “the unexamined life is not worth living” He’s right. ‘Building in’ such simple rituals as our celebration of dining gives us the opportunity to daily examine and celebrate our lives as we go through those daily rituals that give and keep on giving meaning to our lives. The result is a heightened sense of existence connecting us to our most fundamental values. “We build our homes,” said Winston Churchill, “and then our homes build us.” And so they do.
What good architecture does is to deal with the totality of a human existence, to provide at one level the support structure to make human life possible, and at another much richer level to express back to us what it means to be human by giving a sense of place to all our occasions, by building in all our important rituals, by connecting us to what is meaningful in our lives: To sunrises and sunsets; to the sharing of food together; to relaxing with friends; to having time and space for contemplation and for conversation, and for rest, and for sex -- and for rest and contemplation (and conversation) after (and during) sex.
That’s about as important as a job gets, right?
* * * *
BUT ISN’T IT THE CASE that much of our built environment, and hence much of what architects do, is normally beyond our immediate awareness? Most people just don’t notice too much about the buildings they’re in, do they (at least not consciously) – they become ‘second nature’ to us -- unless of course something goes wrong!
We might ‘feel’ a space or a building as being good or bad or uplifting or stultifying or bland or glorious … but we don’t always consciously know why. So tomorrow, we start looking at what architecture is trying to say to you in your home, and how you can ‘listen.’
“The purpose of architecture is
to make a home for man.”
~ Aldo Van Eyck
The purpose of architecture is not just to look nice in magazines. In five words or less, the primary purpose of good architecture is: giving meaning to our lives. To quote the late, great New Zealand architect Claude Megson, "If it doesn't have meaning, then you're just wanking."
In this three-part post, I argue that architecture ‘marks our spot,’ engages our spirits, and tells us daily who we are.
Read on to begin . . .
*** WHEN MAN FINALLY CONQUERED mountain, when Hillary and Tenzing reached the top of Everest for the first time, the story goes that Tenzing fell to his knees and gave thanks to the spirits that had helped their journey; he prayed to each of the four winds who had remained in abeyance; and he carefully placed in the ground at each compass point a small stake on which prayer ribbons were attached. While he was doing this, Hillary stuck a flag in the ground, unzipped his fly and took a piss.
We each mark our territory in very different ways. But we do each mark our territory.
We make buildings to keep the rain off, and in doing so we raise a crown over our head and mark out from the world our own space below.
We mark out for ourselves a place in the world by building a campfire that we keep burning and around which we make comfortable for ourselves, or by raising high our own totem that seems to say “here I am!”
We recognise the important rituals we’ve built into our own lives by making these rituals concrete, literally making them concrete, and by doing so we are saying, “This is important.”
We erect buildings to perform some useful function, and in the act of erecting them they unavoidably perform another crucial useful or symbolic function for us: They embody our values. They tell us we exist. They show us who we are.
Buildings are a concrete expression of values – the values of the people who commissioned, designed, erected and occupy them.
Like every art, architecture is a shortcut to our philosophy. In building architecture we erect an armature that will support ourselves and our important values, and offer us as a place from which to look out upon the world around us. Amongst the myriad of ways this could be done, we each choose the one that does it for us. Live every artformm architecture is a shortcut to our philosophy – which is why our choices are so often so personal to us. The way architecture does that is as an extension of ourselves.
Architecture, as architect Aldo van Eyck says, is about ‘making a home for man.’The space we build is space for human life, for us to inhabit, and from which we can emerge to 'do battle.' It is a place that expresses what a home for man looks like, smells like and sprawls like; it is here that we begin to find the meaning in architecture: the meaning resides in how it makes its home for man.
In the act of making and placing our buildings in the world, we make decisions about what’s important in the world. What values need to be 'built in' and made concrete.
Early morning sun is good; later-afternoon sun often isn’t. Gentle breezes are good inside the house; heavy rain is not. Views of the lake and the trees and the beautiful hills about us are wonderful – views of the local slaughterhouse are not.
Some of these things are highly contextual. Early morning sun is great in Reykjavik, but not always in Dubai in mid-summer. Later-afternoon sun is bad in most parts of the world, but in Murmansk, inside the Arctic Circle, “late afternoon” extends for several months, and is always a welcome guest. Gentle breezes in Hawaii are welcome; in Siberia they might be called a draught. A view of the local slaughterhouse from your lounge window might be highly prized if you’re … okay, I’m stretching on this last one.
The fact remains nonetheless that the choices we make about how we build our shelter, mark our place and decide what functions our building serves for us define something both about us, and about the place we make -- and about the context in which we make it.
HERE’S A VERY BASIC fact from which we start:
WE NEED TO BUILD.
Why so? Animals in general adapt themselves to nature, and they’re mostly already adapted to do that. But humans can’t. We adapt nature to ourselves. We must. We either adapt nature to ourselves, or we die. Unlike animals with their claws and armour, their feathers and strong hides, with all their multiple defences against the world, we human beings have but one: our reasoning brain. On its own this offers no physical defence against predation, and no guarantee of survival: we must learn to use our brain to plan, to invent, to create; to understand the nature of the world around us and to make sense of it and to adapt it to ourselves; to make of it a place in which we are protected, and (as we become more accomplished and learn more about our psychological as well as our physical needs) a place in which we can feel ourselves at home.
We need buildings to shelter us, and not just in the physical sense of shelter. We need a place that is a home: our place, wherein we see ourselves and our own values reflected back, including the value of the home itself and all of us it contains. (When we build a house, in the words of architect Claude Megson, we don’t just build a roof over our heads, “we build a whole universe for ourselves to inhabit” – that place must reflect our whole universe of needs and emotions; the universe of our own soul. In Part 3, we’ll take a tour around our ‘soul’ as reflected in our houses.)
Good architecture then is not just functional on the bare physical plane. We've been out of the caves long enough to do much better than that. “A house is a machine for living,” declared Le Corbusier on behalf of today's cave dwellers. “But only if the heart is a suction pump,’ responded Frank Lloyd Wright.
Architecture is not just shelter; it is not just ‘marking a spot’: its function is also to delight. Our crown might become a dome . . .
Bread and water nourish our stomachs; we need also to nourish our souls. Thirteenth-century Persian poet Muslih-uddin Saadi Shirazi offered this wisdom:
If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft
And from thy slender store
Two loaves alone to thee are left
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.
But buy them only if your heart is not a suction pump.
What good architecture does then is to deal with the totality of a human existence, to provide at one level the support structure to make human life possible, and at another much richer level to express back to us what it means to be human by giving a sense of place to all our occasions, by building in all our important rituals, by connecting us to what is meaningful in our lives: To sunrises and sunsets; to the sharing of food together; to relaxing with friends; to having time and space for contemplation and for conversation, and for rest, and for sex -- and for rest and contemplation (and conversation) after (and during) sex.
That’s about as important as a job gets, right?
Writing about Ferraris, PJ O’Rourke expressed it this way: “Only God can make a tree, but only man can drive by one at 250mph.” THAT is the feeling good architecture should communicate! We take the material that nature provides, and the needs that we have, and those moments where we say to ourselves, “Ah, this is what being alive is all about!” and we give those needs wings -- and we build in and celebrate those moments, and by doing so we express our lives, and we help bring meaning to them.
What could be more important?
In Part 2, we’ll answer the question: if architecture is about ‘making a home for man,’ then what exactly is man?
And in Part 3 we’ll discover what it is about man that needs a home—and we’ll take a tour of the ‘places’ he needs a home for.
Any architect can make a fair fist of impressing with a rich and expensive palate. What architect Claude Megson was very good at was using fairly standard inexpensive materials to create spaces of almost inexpressible delight—the sort that’s sometimes hard to capture through a lens, but that you can feel as soon an you enter his spaces, and delight in even more as you live in them over many years and discover all their many intricacies: the way spaces flow into each other; the links created to the grounds and wider landscape; the vistas through, within (and without) the house …
On the market now, after many years, is the spatial wonderland he crafted forty years ago for the Phillips family of Glenfield: the ‘green house,’ as it was dubbed, for its colour (which now appears the very least of the colours used!).
Inserted into lush bush at the end of a cul-de-sac, this project employs a number of characteristic Megson elements. The base of the house is formed from concrete blocks,with interiors on six-half levels cascading down under an inclined glass roof. Enclosing this is a highly complex composition of “periscope” forms – arranged both vertically and horizontally - that recall the Rees Townhouses, but which are painted a lush green – hence the project being referred to as the “Green House”. Projecting out into the bush on the downhill side of the house is balcony composed as a cantilevered cage of steel pipe, a motif that would reappear in Megson’s own house.
The real estate site says:
Architecturally fabulous and with all the elements of a truly special home, this unique property was designed by the renowned architect Claude Megson and built to admire the nature of the magical Scenic Reserve setting.
Our current owners bought this jewel in April 2000 recognising the beauty of the design, the exquisite location among native trees and the convenience of being at just 10 min drive [ahem – Ed.] to Auckland CBD.
This fabulous property is set on a 1113m² (approx) section and features 3 bedrooms and 3 living areas on six-half levels cascading down under an inclined glass roof that spills light into and throughout the home.
The attention to detail creates a home with a blend of quiet intimate rooms to dramatic areas under the vaulted ceiling, very different from what we are all used to see in the Market.
To absorb the resulting arrangement of spaces, with a gentle division of activities suggested for each of these areas, the first time spectator must spend time roaming the home, revisiting rooms, to understand the feeling and the flavour of each area.
The home is centred around the outdoor and indoor living areas, that inspires to entertain, to invite people to lounge on the open space; long lazy Sunday lunches or formal occasions would all be enhanced by this serene and very private environment.
There are areas for reading, to retreat to, to reflect, to gather with friends and discuss matters of great importance, or to simply absorb the peace of the view of the beautiful Kelmar Scenic Reserve.
Walking down the driveway and looking back to the home, you cannot help feeling inspired with Claude's creation; the current owners have lovingly looked after this home over the years but it is time to hand the mantle onto another owner who will thrive in this exceptional home.
The house has Open Homes this Saturday and Sunday.
Architect Claude Megson in his “green house” soon after completion.
“Architect Dominic Glamuzina says [the original 1970’s house] invokes the feeling that one should have a cocktail in one’s hand at all times while wandering through it.”
- from an article reporting on an extension to Claude Megson’s Rees House, above (part of this complex of townhouses)
Quite right too.
[Pic and caption above from the Auckland Architecture Archive’s excellent Megson itinerary of Auckland houses.]
Now for sale by new owners, here's late architect Claude Megson's own house, perched above tree-clad Dingle Dell in Auckland's St Heliers, with views in the other direction out to Rangitoto and the harbour. A simple looking exterior concealing an awful lot of living within.
Megson took the small, boxy, brick house (right) designed by the architect of the Holy Trinity Cathedral, Richard Toy, and transformed it into something magical, something giving the feel of having discovered a particularly poignant tree-filled glade somehow touched by the gods.
Writing about the transformation a few years ago, architectural critic John Dickson said of it, "It is impossible without the process of Megson's imagination to connect the cluster of small, confined rooms of the house as it was to the expansive, multi-levelled, vertical-fissured, spatial-phantasm that it has become."
A new structure was built over the original brick base, with balconies - described by [former Megson student] Andrew [Barrie] as "cages of mesh and steel tube" - projecting from the house out into the treetops… Andrew Barrie says Claude was a world-class architect. "His houses brought a sculptural quality but they were also incredibly tied to the way people live. Usually, it's one or the other and to do both was unusual ... there were few like him."
For Megson a house was a lot more than just a machine for living—the family house for example house should support and enhance family life, celebrating and artistically expressing all its many aspects.
And English architectural critic Professor Geoffrey Broadbent, writing after a 1992 tour of Claude's Auckland houses had this to say:
"This," I said to myself, "is work of a very high international standard indeed." ...One is constantly struck by the surprise around the corner, the bright shaft of light penetrating from above into the softer glow of the main living spaces -- especially in Megson' own house -- that give his work such very special qualities...Broadbent, for once, is exactly right.
There is an essential "rightness" about Megson's spaces, for pleasant occupation by ordinary, normal human beings. Such things, says Dickson, have gone out of fashion with today's students. Well, so much the worse for the students [and their clients!]. Perhaps it hasn't occurred to them that if they design real spaces for human comfort and pleasure, then even those anguished souls overwhelmed by post-Heideggerian "problematics" about the nature of their existence might, given spaces like Megson's to contemplate that nature of their "Being," come to more positive conclusions! Because that's the point about Megson's spaces; they are life-enhancing.
Claude built the house for his own family as a classic three-zoned family house: with parents’ realm and childrens’ realm’ linked together through the house’s public realm. Agent’s photographs suggest the current owners (and vendors) have retained this spatial planning (well expressed in the exterior, as you can see below), but have restored the house and kitchen elements so they are “largely as they were.”
You may buy it through Barfoot & Thompson.
[Photos by Ted Baghurst and Barfoot & Thompson. More pictures here and here.]
[Cross-posted at the Claude Megson Blog]