Cocker Townhouses - #4/57 Wood St

Claude's Cocker Townhouses in Freeman's Bay have featured here before (here and perhaps most memorably here, when architect Ken Crosson revealed the they remind him "of the main character in Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart" looking out and being energised by the city's skyline) -- and if you're keen you can still see Ray White's pics of # 3 online here).

Now for sale is townhouse #4: the townhouse in the southwest quadrant. The one with the tower!

The recipient of the 2014 NZIA Enduring Architecture Award, what strikes you when you visit (taking advantage of the Open Home), is how much privacy each unit is afforded, and how little you are aware of your neighbours. Who are very, very close. Yet also how much all-day sun each unit enjoys, even in this densely-built little site. It is an ingeniously interwoven set of spaces.

Claude's planning diagram indicates the basic site layout of the four attached houses, the central driveway looking down the vertiginous Gunston St towards the city's towers, with  a ring of protective enclosure to each unit opening up to private open space beyond. An exercise in enclosure and openness -- and as always, Claude's entrances invite you through from darkness towards the light.

There is a little more enclosure in this particular house than there was in 1973 when it was born. And a few more mirrors and "etched glass" than Claude would countenance (his denunciations of architects desecrating the spaces he'd designed with their mirrors could, and did, consume whole lectures). The online Megson Guide describes the struggle that gave these beauties birth:

Originally built as an investment property for Bill Cocker (a lawyer turned painter) and his sister Finola - who now occupy two of the four units - the building took four years to complete and involved enormous wrangling with neighbours and the council. Riffing on the forms of nearby villas and hinting at Mediterranean hilltowns, this building is a complex composition of prismatic forms in white weatherboards with shingle roofs, overlaid with filigreed timber balconies. The living spaces of each unit open onto a private courtyard garden. Bedrooms are located on a floor above, and the roof-level turrets - accessed via trap doors - house small studies with panoramic views over the city and harbour. [See New Zealand Architect no.6, 1977, and Home & Entertaining Aug/Sept, 2002.]

Giles Reid's masterful Megson monograph features these townhouses as one of Megson's early masterpieces, writing that (as with every Megson home, "each of Megson’s rooms and every ritual contained in them was designed around precisely dimensioned furniture settings":

The building is the product of clients wanting both a degree of retreat from the city and to give back to the area. It freely converses with the language of its neighbouring villas and yet also asserts its own modernity.
    The townhouses’ construction is extraordinarily intricate: white painted weatherboards, timber doors and projecting balconies, slate roofs and metal gargoyles. There is even a watch tower, accessed through a smuggler’s hatch after a vertical climb. It gives one of the best views of the city’s skyline...

Wong House Update

Great news everyone!

Stuff reports that Claude Megson's award-winning 1967 Wong House, poorly-marketed as a demolition proposition, "has been saved from demolition" by the new buyers:

The award-winning Remuera cube house designed by renowned architect Claude Megson has been sold and will not be demolished.
Listing agent Holly Cassidy of Ray White Epsom says the house posed no concerns for the buyers when they went through the property. "They knew what to expect – what they would be walking into, so it wasn't a surprise for them.
"They have children and live locally, and they have been looking for a family home while renting. They are planning to renovate the house, but they say they won't be pulling down any walls or moving anything. But they will be reroofing and recladding with modern aluminium battens, not cedar (in a similar profile)."

The Wong House, 1965-67

Considered by a turn-of-the-century roundup in Home and Building Entertaining magazine to be among "The 50 Hottest [NZ] Homes of the Century" -- Megson would have been incensed to have featured down at 37 rather than straight in at number 1! -- the Wong House gave Claude his first NZIA Bronze Medal in 1969. That jury cited the creative weaving and interplay of space, which still remains.

What doesn't remain is some of the actual spaces, nor the original sculpture and stained glass, or timber weatherboards and timber joinery-- all long removed, or replaced with less sensorially delightful alternatives. Like smearing blancmange over beauty.

But that makes it no less desirable internally, nor in how it still so casually opens up the interior to its surroundings.

As the handy Megson guide describes it:

Cascading down a steeply sloping site, every room is expressed as an independent volume clad in dark-stained cedar weatherboards, the resulting composition a masterly interplay of material, line and volume.

Some of the interplay is still there, and the mastery can still at least be detected -- and in the right hands could be resurrected ...

There are open homes at the house on Saturdays and Sundays until sold (by 27 July, says the hopeful agent).

This is a fearfully difficult house to even see from the street, let alone explore. And since it is being marketed as a "create your individual home on (or over) its bones" basis, if you ever did want to see why it won for Megson an early-career Gold Medal, then these pictures and those few open homes may be your only chance.

Get along!

[Pictures from TradeMe, Ray White, Homes To Love, and the Digital Megson Guide]
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Enduring Architecture Award

Very happy to say that last night Claude Megson's Green House, in Glenfield, won an Enduring Architecture Award at the NZIA awards dinner. The judges said "to walk into the sculptural house is like stepping into a Mondrian painting."

Nice to see Megson's work being recognised, and his memory being kept alive.

NB: I posted about the Green house a couple of years ago, when it went on the market. By all accounts, the new owners' remodelling is a great success, and I'd love to hear more!
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