This family villa in Mt Eden needed a new kitchen, living and dining area. It had a typical lean-to with a laundry and a toilet off to the east and the kitchen facing onto the back garden so that when you walked down the hallway you could see straight into the room.

It was a family renovation. Dominic Glamuzina was commissioned by his brother-in law and his wife, so he had eaten plenty of roast dinners in the existing kitchen and dining room and knew the lay of the land. It was quite a basic set-up with one obvious solution being to chop off the back where the lean-to sat and start again with a pavilion room housing the kitchen, living and dining. The space is a box form that is built out from under the existing roofline.

This offered them the opportunity to get a relationship to the back garden where there hadn’t been before, Glamuzina says. The house sits on a nice section and also has lovely borrowed views of an established garden next door. The clients wanted to make more of this space and be better connected to it.

The plan was designed to improve the connection to the east, not just the south as had been the case. So on the eastern side of the large, box-like extension, there is a set of big sliding doors that look out onto the garden and a solid wall with a little window. This means that when you are in the dining area you naturally look out to the east courtyard.

Glamuzina talked with his clients a lot about how they would like to use the kitchen space day-to-day. For example, the sink to be large enough for a roasting tray, so the central island needed to be large enough to make sure the scale wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the sink and the client would have heaps of room to work. The client also specified the gas cooktop and oven really early on – they are impressive and certainly look roast-ready, and were factored into the design of the kitchen layout and cabinetry.

Despite the room being a large open-plan space Glamuzina was keen to create the feel of their being different spaces to occupy within the room. The solid wall and picture window on the eastern side of the space create a natural ‘room’ for the dining table to inhabit. The picture window also offers another scale and proportionality that straight glazing wouldn’t have.

The space has a clean simple material palette made up of white and neutral tones. The rich recycled kauri on the floors ensures that the space still feels warm and also provides textural warmth.