The two architects in the family drew his mother 70sqm of her own, with a front door she reaches straight off the street.
A watering can lives on Chris Shaw’s front step. When it’s out, her grandchildren know they can let themselves in. When it isn’t, they don’t. The system arrived after they worked out that knocking, long enough and cheerfully enough, would eventually produce their grandmother, whatever shift she’d come off.
Chris is a nurse who works at the hospice, and she lives above her son and daughter-in-law’s garage in Cashmere, in a house the family calls Kererū Corner after her nickname. Geordie and Emma Shaw came south when Geordie’s father Brian became unwell. They run Shaw & Shaw Architects in Ōtautahi/Christchurch, a practice built on the idea that good architecture shouldn’t depend on the size of the budget. No client tests that as hard as your own mother.
The two households bought a split-level property, Chris and Brian upstairs, Geordie and Emma below. The practical arrangement gave them more than they’d planned for: breakfasts together, teeth brushed side by side, their eldest, Alvar (now 7), on his grandfather’s knee getting a third of the Nutri-Grain. “It was all those moments beyond a shared meal once a Sunday,” says Emma.
Sketching for a second dwelling began while Brian was alive, and he was part of that early work. After he passed away the brief changed shape. Torren (4) and then Romalie (1) had arrived downstairs, and Chris was alone upstairs, wanting somewhere of her own that was still inside everybody’s day.
Then somebody looked at the garage: a gable-roofed box holding boxes. It sat in the sunniest part of a steep section, opening onto the street, so Chris could come home from a shift and park at her own door. Building further down in the garden would have cost trees; going over the garage spared the elm and the plum, and the slab was already there.
Chris’s brief came with a number: she and Brian once stayed in a 70sqm bach and agreed it was completely liveable. The garage measures 6 x 7 metres, and the new house stacks two floors on it. “So you have 40 here and technically 40 up there, and once you subtract the stairs and the loft net, it gets to about 70,” says Geordie. “He’s talked me into believing that it is,” says Chris. “I didn’t mind it being small. I just didn’t want it to feel small.”
Height was the answer: two storeys above the street and three above the garage floor, which is a tall thing to set on a suburban corner. So the roof folds, origami-like, dropping where it came up against the recession plane and again at its midpoint, breaking the mass into faces you can take in at a glance.
Inside, it’s one room with a loft, divided but not closed off, because there’s a net where a balustrade would be. The bed’s up there, with bunks for grandchildren tucked around the corner. That’s how Chris gets a view across the bush to Princess Margaret Hospital, where she trained, and the Alps beyond.
Downstairs does the rest of the work. Chris was downsizing, and built-in joinery had to hold a whole life, without feeling like it. “You don’t want one of those studio apartments where you’re sitting on top of your stove,” says Geordie.
“I chase the sun around,” comments Chris. Coffee on the window seat by the door in the morning, the west deck in the evening. There’s no part she keeps for best.
Geordie wanted a deep red floor to riff off the main house roof. “I just didn’t know if I could wake up to the intensity of that every day,” says Chris, who chose a warm caramel linoleum instead. The red got in anyway — she walked into a shop with a friend, not looking for fabric, and came out with a roll on sale. Now it covers the squabs on her window seat.
The rimu ceiling over the loft nearly didn’t happen. Geordie and Emma had drawn it to echo the one in the house below, but the cost of the recycled timber was an obvious target to make savings in a stretched budget. Late in the build Emma and Chris discussed giving it up for painted ply. Geordie’s answer was that it was too late, it was already ordered. “He held the bar when we were wavering,” says Chris. “It was like trust the chef. Trust the architect.”
Emma sat at the third point of that, architect and daughter-in-law at once. “Geordie doesn’t doubt himself, which is a good quality in an architect,” she says. “I push the boat out and Emma says when it’s too far,” adds Geordie. Chris went to Emma when she and Geordie went round and round on things.
Not every family could do this. It works here because they like each other enough to spend a Saturday weeding together, Chris and Geordie in the garden she used to tend with Brian. Design does the rest: a way in off the street, with the vehicle crossing cut in so she can drive right up to a door of her own. She hadn’t expected to enjoy the street so much — quiet without being isolating, with the goings-on in earshot when she wants them.
People bring assumptions to a house like this. From the outside it looks like an elegant way to acquire a babysitter, and the watering can is the answer to that: the service runs at Chris’s discretion, and hours are posted on the front step. It’s also the sort of place someone her age is steered away from. Some visitors leave thinking they could live here; others can’t see it at all. “It doesn’t feel surprising,” says Chris. “It’s fun and youthful, and feels like me.”
She’s never lived in a house that wasn’t also somebody else’s. This one was drawn around her but, even so, there’s still a place in it for all of them.
Words Alice Lines
Photography Mary Gaudin
The post Above the family garage, a Christchurch mother downsizing on her own terms appeared first on Homestyle.
