Grappling with the grid
In an idyllic location, the apartments are sited close to the Hobsonville Point ferry terminal.
The view from Harrier Point Park shows the project’s protected viewshaft.
The two-level wharf terraces are aligned with the height of the Sunderland Hangar doors. Hangar doors. The courtyard apartments look over the top of the terraces.
The view to the building across the Launch Road Reserve.
The grid expressed on the apartment towers’ east and west façades is different from that on the northern balcony façade.
The view at street level, from the south, shows the pre-cast concrete façade to the parking floors.
The wharf terraces have indented entries along the street.
The wharf terraces have indented entries along the street.
The corner unit of the wharf terraces.
An upper-level corner apartment interior.
An apartment bedroom.
The verandah ceilings on the top-floor upper-level apartment balconies lift skywards.
This wharf terrace living space is on the second floor and looks across the upper harbour.
Ground floor, and upper-floor plan.
Cross-section; Ferry approach sketch.
Site plan.
Site plans.
Chris Barton visits the Catalina Bay Apartments in Hobsonville Point by Architectus and finds meticulous planning, embracing and disrupting the grid.
As we walk downhill on Launch Road towards the water, the morning sun is shining, a surging Waitematā tide is high and the cicadas are in full voice — a summer din, signalling all is well, at least in this idyllic-looking part of the world. On our left are the Catalina Bay Apartments at Hobsonville Point — two towers by Architectus rising from the seabed below.
I hazard a description.
“It’s very modernist?”
“Yes,” says Architectus principal Patrick Clifford.
“Almost brutalist?”
“Woah.”
I’ve gone too far. “By that I mean it’s very honest in its expression of structure and materials,” I scramble.
“I would say muscular; it’s got a bit of strength,” suggests Architectus associate principal Shane Parker.
“It’s got quite a strong grid,” agrees Clifford.
It has. An underlying steel frame is clearly expressed on some façades with a repeating 5.5m beam span on the north and south elevations, strongly visible in the balcony modules, and an 8.5m repeating span on the east and west elevations. Columns between floor and ceiling beams are 2.7m high. All framing elements are covered in a brown aluminium cladding system. “We are in a marine environment,” says Clifford. “We wanted something that’s clearly metallic, not rusty, but quite weathered.”
On our right as we continue downhill is Estuarine, the Louise Purvis gabion wall artwork commissioned by the Hobsonville Land Company in 2015 — tubular gabion baskets filled with red scoria and snaking 70m against a backdrop of a huge grey scoria gabion retaining wall. Ideally, it would have been nice to have gabion baskets at the base of the apartments says Parker. It wasn’t to be. Although, he says, there was some effort to make the pre-cast concrete base — not quite béton brut — look tonally similar.
We climb the stairs up to the retained, raised playground of Harrier Point Park and take in the view through the towers and across the upper Waitematā Harbour to a just-visible trig station atop a bushy hill beside the Greenhithe Bridge. The view — actually a protected viewshaft mandated by the area’s precinct controls — had somehow been forgotten in the design process and, for a moment, threatened to derail the whole project. At that stage, the apartments were one long rectangular block complying with a 27m-height limit plane.
“The forgotten viewshaft was actually really good. It rescaled the buildings,” says Clifford. “We took out the bit in the middle and put it on top. It reorganised the mass.” Somehow, in removing the middle of the building, exceeding the height limit either side was approved. Hence, the two towers: one to the east has six floor levels, 33.5m high, and the other to the west has 10 levels and is 47m high. In the process, the building acquired more façade to provide more views for the apartments. Most of the 82 one, two and threebedroom units interlocked within the building’s grid are dual aspect, with some, the corner units, having the luxury of triple aspect.
The interiors of the apartments are spacious. There’s a range of open-plan kitchen-dining-living configurations, each opening with sliding floor-to-ceiling glazed doors to a generous 2.3m-deep by 5.5m-wide verandah — an indented outdoor room with, in every case, a spectacular upper-harbour view. By far the best are those with an eastern aspect, providing a long, lingering view down the harbour to the city. The verandah arrangement, combined with dual-aspect apartments, provides shade for the living spaces and enables natural through-ventilation, supplemented by individual heat pumps also located on the verandah decks.
As we reach the bottom of Launch Road, we’re beside the water on a huge platform space just above the high-tide mark, first used in 1927 by the gargantuan Sunderland seaplanes and, between 1943 and 1953, by the Royal New Zealand Airforce Catalina seaplanes. This is the best way to arrive at this building — not by car but by boat: specifically, via the Hobsonville ferry that drops you at the end of a long wharf, just five minutes’ walk from the apartments’ wharf-side entry next to the Sunderland Hangar. The Hangar now operates as a restaurant space for craft brewer, Little Creatures.
Here you can appreciate the way in which the apartments are decoupled from the ground plane with a two-level plinth comprising a row of nine two-storey ‘wharf terraces’ townhouses, clad in concrete brick. The height of the townhouses is aligned with the top of the huge, now-folding 8.9m-high glass doors of the adjacent Sunderland Hangar, built in 1939.
Behind the wharf terraces and supported on 51 piles sunk 15m into the sea-bed are two levels of concrete floors for 127 car parks. The end result is a ground-level row of nine townhouses at the base of the podium and 10 ‘courtyard apartments’ on top of the podium looking out over the roofs of the townhouses. In the towers above are 61 upper apartments and two penthouses.
All this precision comes at a cost. In February, at the time of writing, developer Willis Bond has sold 65 out of 82 apartments. A one-bedroom 56m2 unit with a car park is on the market at $995,000. The 141m2 penthouses cost between $4.5 million and $5 million. Townhouses are around $2 million.
Clifford says the building took its gridded form in response to the existing buildings around its base — the Sunderland Hangar, the former Fabric Building (now a café) where fabric for the seaplanes was made, the Catalina Workshops building, the Armoury and, in particular, the GRP building where technicians worked with glass-reinforced plastics.
“Even though this is a bigger building, the pieces of building that existed on the site are quite defined,” says Clifford. “They are quite strong grids. We wanted to make some reference to those: something that was quite grounded and blocky.”
Adherence to the grid, adds Clifford, is a key to working out the complexities of apartment design in terms of efficiency of structure, materials and circulation.
Is it also important at times to break free of it?
“I don’t think we are slavish to grid,” he says.
“I generally like that different orientations do not have to be the same.” He points to the east and west elevations where the glazing is a free-for-all mix of different-sized panes: some transparent, some translucent.
While the Catalina Bay Apartments, with all that concrete and steel, won’t win any awards for embodied carbon sustainability, they do achieve a 5 Homestar rating for operational residential sustainability. They also seem built to last, as long as sea-level rise doesn’t change the coastline too severely in Auckland’s inner harbour. They are a bravura assertion of working the grid to deliver a precise and impressive marine aesthetic, belonging to its place.
