Lloyd Hartley are not whizz-bang architects. We love to craft. To iterate. And to resolve.

Partly, this is self-preservation — not wanting to be called out by builders on site in front of clients. Partly, this is a product of our humble beginnings as a practice — trying to find the meat in small hand-me-down projects and deck extensions.

Mostly, though, it is a desire to understand: to understand how to form spaces around a client’s needs and ambitions; to explore the ways in which tactile materials can come together in satisfying and beautiful ways; to interrogate how to make generic approaches and details better; and, to understand how to communicate this to the myriad of people involved in realising a successful building.

Thrown together in 1997 as first-year students at the University of Auckland, leaving behind our familial comforts in the South Island, we (Ben Lloyd and Mike Hartley) bonded over sports, pints of Guinness at The Dog’s Bollix and any opportunity to dress up and engage in shenanigans.

A formative moment in our collective education was a fourth-year study trip to Italy and Croatia in 2001. Experiencing the gravity of architecture constructed hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago and the enduring marks of the craftsmen, of history and of the undefinable number of inhabitants that are still visible today, was essential in developing our love of making and the physicality involved in architecture.

As animated as Ross Jenner could get describing some of these buildings, the physical grandeur of these universally known monuments or the quiet repose presented by something like Bramante’s Tempietto could be fully embraced only in person.

It was also very humbling, personally, to a couple of impressionable chaps in their early 20s to be thrown completely out of our depth and to realise how little we knew about the world and how to occupy it.

This was a time before everyone had a mobile phone in their pocket and it is still a vivid memory hearing whispers of something significant happening while we were creating watercolour drawings of Korčula’s rampart walls. It’s hard to imagine, now, being so disconnected from the outside world that it would take the best part of a day to realise that something like September 11 had happened.

The idea that we could be so fully immersed in the moment, and in a particular place, rather than being constantly inundated by the outside noise, now makes it seem as though it was 100 years ago. It is something we like to explore in our work. Pushing back against a world mediated through small glass screens, we like to provide moments of material warmth, tactility and embrace. We love to think that our architecture could give its inhabitants a warm cuddle. Intimacy and physical connection are important to us and our clients.

Prior to officially establishing Lloyd Hartley, we worked together on a few low-stakes side hustles as a means of testing a potential working relationship. These included university tutoring, competitions and some small-scale architectural interventions. The primary focus of these was to see if we could indeed work together. Communication approaches and strategies were tested, with several early project conversations being ‘Sent from my iThrone’. We have since developed more conventional lunchtime catchups and project-specific critique sessions.

As we are two people who like to ‘do’, it has been a discovery of a suitable process — one we still haven’t completely mastered but one that is ever-evolving — especially as it became more serious and we were trying to establish a sustainable business. Where we’ve currently landed is that we each need to be the other’s ‘benevolent critic’.

It is a process based on trust: trust that the project takes precedent over personal agendas and trust that the input of the other makes the project better. Acknowledging that we both have specific strengths and leaning on these through the various stages of our larger projects, especially, ensures a level of accountability and bursts of enthusiasm when needed.

Expanding on our own ‘two heads are better than one’ approach, we find collaboration with clients, consultants and contractors to be especially beneficial. We firmly believe that a process of ‘playing nicely with others’ has offered us far more agency over successful outcomes than an authoritarian approach ever could. I. M. Pei’s words ring in our ears every day: “It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You cannot work in the abstract.”

One of our first significant projects (after figuring out how to write a fee proposal) was a renovation of a 1960s’ brick-and-tile home in Herne Bay. The existing two-storey house sat stubbornly in the middle of its site at the end of a long driveway and presented an opportunity for us not only to bring some architectural clarity to the renovation and greater connection to the site but, also, to weave in a number of bespoke crafted elements that allowed us to sink our teeth into the ‘crafting’ part of architecture.

Finding moments where we can critique, explore and distil the generic has been something that we try to incorporate into all of our projects. Where we have the opportunity to consider something and not immediately reach for the default is where we find joy.

In this particular project, we focused on two key areas which have since become staples of our architectural practice — the carving out of volume and a prioritising of the tactile elements in our designs.

Taking a two-storey ‘monopoly house’ and surgically removing portions of its bulk allowed for the house to connect to its immediate landscape and to open onto the ever-changing estuary in Cox’s Bay. This carving out of volume extended upwards, with a series of skylights connecting the house with a large, established pōhutukawa tree on the site.

We then focused our design on the curating/crafting of all the elements that our clients touch as they engage with the home. A bespoke brass front door and intercom set the tone for a series of handcrafted metallic items throughout, which are offset by a number of softer, more organic, materials.

Following this, we have been able to refine our approach via a number of commissions around New Zealand and Australia, where sculpted and carved-out spaces draw in natural light and connect our clients and inhabitants to the wider environment. Handcrafted bespoke balustrades, handrails, handles, entry systems and cabinetry have been integrated into every project, where possible, to provide thoughtful, haptic experiences for the occupants of our buildings.

The entry sequence in our Sandtrap project is one such example. Visitors are welcomed into a vertical engagement with the fabric of the building and are then transitioned via a rich and light-filled hallway leading to an open kitchen and living space, which then establishes a horizontal engagement with the landscape beyond. Tactility and resonance are explored with the bespoke elements of the recessed interior stair handrail, exterior stair balustrade and the front-door handle all sharing a common language and feel.

Spatial conditions that support togetherness, intimacy and the ability to retreat all provide the flexibility in a home that needs to cater for its multigenerational inhabitants. We first explored this approach to multiple smaller spaces being connected visually to support comfortable groupings in our Hill to Horizon project and it is an approach we have built on since. We have found employing courtyards, covered outdoor spaces and active circulation in our architecture provides people with the opportunity to connect and retreat as they need.

At Lloyd Hartley, we also love adding life(span) to existing buildings. After finishing university, we had several contemporaries leave and establish themselves in the UK and Europe. The consistent counterpoint to our envy of their travels and lives in large cosmopolitan cities is their frustration with never getting to work on anything new. We almost have the opposite problem here. A lack of an enduring built history and New Zealand’s obsession with the tabula rasa means that it is often easier and cheaper simply to tear down and start again. Sometimes that is required but we have established a practice with a reasonable proportion of our projects being smaller-scale architectural interventions.

We find the challenges presented within the limitations of an existing built fabric to be cathartic. Learning from older buildings is less about how to do things and more about exploring opportunities to uncover and embrace the underlying character of the time and to find a way to reveal a second life within the context of a specific commission.

We have been charged with renovating several character apartments in central Auckland, particularly on Emily Place, and, with each apartment, through a process of unpeeling various layers of construction, we were able (along with our clients and contractors) to find an agreed baseline of history to then work out from. In each instance, this uncovered numerous construction quirks and historical artefacts from the early 1900s, which were celebrated; we then set to work interweaving a new layer of built strata to accommodate a modern brief.

Our most successful example of this was ‘A Diaphanous Design’, which was an exploration in layering, texture, transparency and privacy. Several industrial elements and materials were used, and there is a lightness in both the ambience and the adaptability of the apartment that belies the inherent heaviness of the components.

As parents, we are incredibly cognisant of wanting to create architecture that is enduring and sustainable. For us, the most sustainable statement we can make is to create an architecture that is multigenerational and spaces that enhance the underlying human spirit through use and beauty. Useful and beautiful things are simply not thrown out.

Having both carried out renovations on our own homes and personally juggled that balance between budget and ‘architecture’, we are intimately aware of how emotionally fraught the process of building can be. Our studio prides itself on being a full-service practice, on being in it for the long haul and on taking seriously our role as lead consultant throughout the building project. Ultimately, delivering a built outcome is way more important to us than having a series of beautiful Instagram images.

And, hopefully, we can have both. Mike’s own home is a perfect encapsulation of our architectural ethos. Dubbed ‘The Luxury of Enough’, this renovation of a 1950s’ weatherboard home in Beach Haven is our first NZIA National Awards winner and is the exemplar of enforced restraint in brief-setting and design response.

Articulating circulation just enough to provide eddy spaces for the five inhabitants to pause, disperse and dance through their domestic lives, and tailoring the sizes of the children’s bedrooms to be just enough to ‘sleep in and sulk in’, allowed for a second living space — a ‘Room of Requirement’.

A central dining and kitchen portmanteau space demonstrates our ability to eschew conventional thought by replacing the generic response of a kitchen island with a generous and inclusive communal area full of functional cabinetry and working surfaces.

The same approach has been taken to the numerous villa and other early New Zealand house typology renovations we’ve completed. Key examples are ‘Tight & Light’, ‘Clare’s Place’ and ‘Gable Revival’, where the value of the intervention was considered over, perhaps, a more ‘fashionable’ statement.

We are reminded of the Louis Kahn quote: “Design is not making beauty; beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.” To date, we’ve found that the approach of Lloyd Hartley being a bespoke tailor trumps that of the avant-garde fashionistas.

We suspect that, as the building industry matures, there will be an understanding that resources, when deployed well, can create places and spaces that sustain the human conditions of connection and well-being, and that our approach will stand us in good stead.

With the many amazing sites that exist across New Zealand, architects have a great deal of responsibility to set in motion projects that are of their place and of their time, and to ensure that they are detailed and constructed well enough to be also timeless.

Terrace houses in Auckland and new homes in the Coromandel are currently benefiting from our considered, tailored approach and we look forward to exercising our empathy and endless care factor on all manner of future projects for the people we serve.

We are excited about delving into smaller commercial builds, fishing lodges, resorts and medium-density living, and continuing to bring together families in incredible settings. Perhaps because we have such amazing locations, our role is not to be whizz-bang. Perhaps we can simply find the best way to connect people with their surroundings and support their ambitions to better themselves and their communities.

Lloyd Hartley is an award-winning architecture, interiors and project-management practice based in Auckland, New Zealand. With projects throughout Australasia, the studio works closely with its clients to make places and spaces for people to experience and celebrate positive human interactions. lloydhartley.com @lloydhartleyarchitects