Studio Studio brings Danish design aesthetic to Arrowtown
Simple, natural interior furnishings create a calm, warm environment and craft is celebrated throughout.
Targetti night lights line the driveway, ensuring all light points down so as not to disturb the birdlife.
The original house was built in stone. Interior walls are finished with a porous limestone paint.
Where the kitchen meets the living space, the original schist walls are revealed.
The dining table celebrates natural timber and features a bow tie detail showing the joining technique used.
Hand-stitching features on the FK10 Plico chair in the family room.
Junctions between the plaster walls and the oak floors have been removed.
The coffee table is made from a thick piece of oak.
The Inoda + Sveje IS Lounge Chair for Miyazaki. The coffee table was scalloped by hand in Matakana.
The gradient of the tiles in the powder room was purposefully offset by the designers, row by row, to create a continuous flow.
A passion purchase made at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic saw one of Studio Studio designer Sebastian Negri’s clients relocate from Auckland to the outskirts of Arrowtown, to embrace the winter lifestyle that the small town and nearby Coronet Peak had to offer. Amanda Harkness investigates.
His client’s existing dwelling, according to Negri, had a whole lot going on in terms of finishes – imagine English cottage meets art-deco – with an overriding masculine aesthetic added to the mix. An initial part-renovation brief soon extended to cover the full 260m2 of the main house, maintaining the existing envelope while creating a new interior with infrastructure suited to the cold, local conditions.
“Our approach was to essentially ‘clean’ the house, to make it feel bigger,” explains Negri. “We treated it almost as if it was a monastry, removing all skirtings, mouldings and architraves which had previously been used to disguise errors and imperfections, giving every window a thin, frame-like reveal in Japanese timber, and promoting a sense of wellbeing in our use of natural materials.”
Negri and fellow creative director Maria Diaz Valentin’s first response was to resolve the mechanics of the interior, easing the stylistic clashes and addressing material tension. They looked on the project as not just a renovation but, rather, a regeneration – “healing the home to help the body heal”. The pair spent days absorbing the house’s sensory language: the acoustics, natural light, heat patterns, textures and scents. “This formed the base of our architectural response, which was to make the home feel intentional, calm and newly whole.”
Under the premise that they wanted the existing good, honest and local materials to stay, accepting and understanding their defects and flaws and the limitations imposed by them, saw the existing rimu ceilings, rendered walls, schist walls and fireplace surrounds remain in place.
The main exercise then became one of harmonising the three separate volumes with materials such as smoked-oak timber floors and restoring and adding plaster to the larger spaces. New materials in the form of natural stone (limestone and marble) and crafted Japanese tiles were introduced to the kitchen and bathrooms.
What Negri and Diaz Valentin have done here started with imagining the home’s future personality, then reorienting the interior architecture toward views and introducing invisible layers of infrastructure to futureproof the house. The addition of a unified palette of natural materials to embody the idea of regeneration also brings a gentle, soothing cohesion to the project.
Studio Studio’s thoughtful design interventions have created a calming, sensory home that is very much rooted in place and which successfully blurs the boundaries between old and new, function and feeling – a world apart from the previous iteration of the house.
