What is The Boiler Room?

Established in 1999, The Boiler Room combines our love of quality salvaged furniture and demolition materials with a desire to create something fresh and worthwhile from found objects. While many pieces stand full of character as they are, others are painstakingly restored to their former glory, or combined with furniture that Gary has designed and built from scratch to create something entirely new. Following six years in the city, with a showroom in Balmoral and then Grey Lynn, we relocated The Boiler Room to our workshop and studio at Muriwai, where for the last four years we have focused on high-end commission work, and more recently, exhibitions. We’re excited to have a public front again, and in a context that fits seamlessly with The Boiler Room ethos – a vast industrial workspace that gives a sense of where the pieces have come from.
 
Where did the inspiration come from?

First, to develop old found objects as an art form. Finding stuff is a sport. Typical of so many New Zealanders, we have accumulated interesting objects from the workplace that are sculptural, different in that they are industrial in colouring and often methodically pleasing to the eye. These objects often line up or are gradated in size or they fit into each other. But they no longer have a direct use. While these can be appreciated in their original form, we were passionate about redeveloping this material into the functional and the designed or, if that wasn’t a natural progression, to set them or frame them into a visual context where they can be fully appreciated. Second, to save old objects from being destroyed. So much of these historical items have been turfed and it has also been our passion to save these pieces, and reset them as functional, such as copper boilers or printers’ guillotines. Third, to see the opportunity in incorporating furniture into the bigger interior design picture. When working on a fit-out, Gary found the making of the signature furniture pieces were the most enjoyable part of the process.

What are the most amazing things or people you’ve come across?

Knowledge from the old guys; the templates at The Foundary for the old Auckland Harbour Board; the sailmakers; the copper urns from the Jaffa factory; the old railway guy who fixes the trains. Then there were the sheds, full of storage cabinets, trolleys and other working furniture that they made on site. They had to make their own work tables but they had government money and timber. There was a resourceful shed where a guy had created storage systems to put his three-inch bolts and his special copper nails; it was an array of segmented and ordered spaces in the chaos and he knew where everything was.

Read full interview in Houses issue number 20 which also features New Zealand’s best houses of 2011.