Studio Studio brings Danish design aesthetic to Arrowtown

His consumer’s present dwelling, in response to Negri, had a complete lot happening when it comes to finishes – think about English cottage meets art-deco – with an overriding masculine aesthetic added to the combo. An preliminary part-renovation temporary quickly prolonged to cowl the total 260m2 of the principle home, sustaining the prevailing envelope whereas creating a brand new inside with infrastructure suited to the chilly, native circumstances.

“Our strategy was to basically ‘clear’ the home, to make it really feel larger,” explains Negri. “We handled it nearly as if it was a monastry, eradicating all skirtings, mouldings and architraves which had beforehand been used to disguise errors and imperfections, giving each window a skinny, frame-like reveal in Japanese timber, and selling a way of wellbeing in our use of pure supplies.”

Negri and fellow inventive director Maria Diaz Valentin’s first response was to resolve the mechanics of the inside, easing the stylistic clashes and addressing materials stress. They regarded on the undertaking as not only a renovation however, reasonably, a regeneration – “therapeutic the house to assist the physique heal”. The pair spent days absorbing the home’s sensory language: the acoustics, pure mild, warmth patterns, textures and smells. “This shaped the bottom of our architectural response, which was to make the house really feel intentional, calm and newly complete.” 

Underneath the premise that they wished the prevailing good, trustworthy and native supplies to remain, accepting and understanding their defects and flaws and the constraints imposed by them, noticed the prevailing rimu ceilings, rendered partitions, schist partitions and fireside surrounds stay in place.

The principle train then grew to become certainly one of harmonising the three separate volumes with supplies equivalent to smoked-oak timber flooring and restoring and including plaster to the bigger areas. New supplies within the type of pure stone (limestone and marble) and crafted Japanese tiles had been launched to the kitchen and bogs. 

What Negri and Diaz Valentin have accomplished right here began with imagining the house’s future persona, then reorienting the inside structure towards views and introducing invisible layers of infrastructure to futureproof the home. The addition of a unified palette of pure supplies to embody the thought of regeneration additionally brings a mild, soothing cohesion to the undertaking.

Studio Studio’s considerate design interventions have created a calming, sensory house that could be very a lot rooted in place and which efficiently blurs the boundaries between outdated and new, operate and feeling – a world other than the earlier iteration of the home.