![]() “The place feels much longer, even though we’ve only added a couple of metres,” says Jeremy, whose other big play is at the opposite end of the house, where he has opened access to the outside from the dining space. Combined with the removal of an internal wall to the kitchen, it has produced a view all the way through the house. The next step was to reconfigure the entrance to the other girls’ adjacent bedrooms, creating shared access and a pool of light at the end of what had been a dead-end corridor. “It’s a space I can retreat to and relax in,” she says. “People are always standing down there looking up at it I don’t know what they think it is,” says Bonita, who made the risky but inspired choice of painting her room Resene ‘Gravel’, a deep, dirty grey that sets off the pink magnolia tree framed in the eastern window, and emphasises the room’s cocoon-like feel. Viewed from outside it seems too narrow, but inside, Tardis-like, it doubles, comfortably accommodating a bed, desk and window seat. The circuit breaker was the addition of a new bedroom – that mystery box sitting on the garage, appropriately a 13th birthday present for Bonita. So we really needed to find a way of elongating it and creating space, without it appearing bigger.” “That’s why he made a small, very contained brick building on a plinth. ![]() “Alex Bowman didn’t intend this house to get any bigger,” Jeremy says. He didn’t feel inhibited by Bowman’s status as a prominent local architect, but he accepted – celebrated, really – what his predecessor did with the house. Jeremy’s plan began with an acknowledgement of the limits. Lack of direct access to the garden was another issue. But even after converting the original twin studies into bedrooms, they were still one short. The Morrissey-Smiths admired Bowman’s plan and crafted detailing they liked the way he’d glazed it heavily to the western street-side and north, while maintaining privacy elsewhere, and they loved the elevated site. He set the small, brick and slightly brutalist home against a neighbourhood of enormous heritage villas. Bowman, who virtually single-handedly introduced international modernism to Nelson in the 1960s, had designed this one for a retired couple. In fact, both additions are entirely purposeful, necessary elements of the architect’s clever rearrangement of a much-loved but too-small house into a home for a family of five.įunnily enough, when Jeremy and his wife Genevieve Morrissey bought the Alex Bowman-designed house in 2009, its bijou scale was part of the attraction, despite having three daughters – Bonita, Scarlett and Coco Plum (now 15, 12 and seven respectively). Seen from the road, its function isn’t clear at all. Housing for a stairway, perhaps? At the other end, and equally at odds with its conventional façade, the little brick house is framed by… well, by a frame, a rectangle of industrial-scale steel suspended below the gable. How else to explain his delight when passersby stop in surprise outside his family home? This example of 1960s modernism, set on a plinth above a quiet Nelson street, has been transformed by Jeremy into a genuine “double-take” house by two arresting additions.Ĭrowning the garage at the southern end is an obviously contemporary black steel and timber box, about two metres wide, darkly glazed and ambiguous. There’s a side to architect Jeremy Smith that enjoys sowing confusion. How a gentle renovation created a Nelson family home Designed by acclaimed modernist architect Alex Bowman, this Nelson home was transformed to fit its new family while staying true to the original aesthetic
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