A Curated Contemporary Apartment – Britomart Apartment by Carole Whiting & Daniel Varcoe

A collaborative project undertaken across the Tasman by Melbourne-based interior designer Carole Whiting and owner Daniel Varcoe, Britomart Apartment is a considered yet dynamic ode to contemporary art and design in the heart of one of Auckland’s most vibrant districts.

Set within a 100-year-old warehouse in the Britomart district in downtown Auckland, the apartment’s location and character initially drew Dan to the loft, which he purchased as an investment in 2015. As he was living and working in Sydney at the time, it was rented out until early 2019, when the decision to move back to New Zealand prompted him to consider making the apartment home. With his role as Design Development Manager at Fisher & Paykel necessitating close engagement with the architecture and design industry, Dan and Carole Whiting had worked together over many years and so the project began rather informally with Dan requesting Carole’s input on a decision regarding the ceiling.

“He called me one day and asked what he should do about the dull brown timber ceiling in his loft apartment. Should he plaster it over, what did I think?” she recalls. “I took one look at the photos and saw how amazing it would look painted white – it turned out to be a bit of an epic job but it totally defines the apartment as a loft space and hints at the heritage of the building.” From then on, Dan explains, the design process unfolded remotely, through discussion and the exchange of photos, measurements and sketches, and in person on the occasions he returned to Australia to visit.

“The kitchen was the first thing we designed. I love Carole’s own kitchen in her apartment in South Melbourne,” he says. “This is like a smaller, reconfigured version.” The apartment’s original kitchen was oversized, taking up more space than was necessary, the new iteration is a metre shorter and sits almost as a contained unit of joinery against the walls, with a tall dining table at the centre, custom built by IMO Group, that provides additional bench surface. The effect of the kitchen as a defined object within the space is emphasised by the uniformly dark palette within the otherwise light space, with black porcelain benchtops, black handles, black trimless ZETR power outlets and switches, and appliances that are either fully integrated or also entirely black.

“With the kitchen being black, our [Fisher & Paykel] black ovens and gas-on-glass cooktop, with their minimalist aesthetic, were the obvious choice,” says Dan. A full-size 90cm integrated refrigerator was chosen instead of a smaller model that might be a more typical apartment selection. “It’s a great product and the bigger hinges mean you can run the door taller and have a secret cupboard– so no breakline,” he explains. Similarly integrated is the DishDrawer, invisible within the cabinetry, and another hidden appliance is to be found in a small freestanding joinery unit, where a CoolDrawer turns the piece of furniture into a bar.

While the kitchen is in deliberate contrast to the living space and bedrooms, (“which are painted Carole’s signature shade of Dulux, of course, top-secret ‘Whiting White’,” Dan explains) his extensive personal collection of art and furniture becomes a running thread between the spaces. “You can see the art start to establish itself in the kitchen; it’s like a creeper plant stretching its shoots across all the spaces,” says Carole. “Art is super important to Dan and is his big passion [so] the walls and wall light fittings in the house really needed to be simple and white.”

Set within a 100-year-old warehouse in the Britomart district in downtown Auckland, the apartment’s location and character initially drew Dan to the loft, which he purchased as an investment in 2015.

Buying and selling art continuously, Dan rotates the works on display in the apartment on a regular basis. Fortuitously, the original high ceilings mean that “the space has got the perfect bones to allow me to be eclectic with the artworks and have large scale works, like the Rone work painted on four window panes or the big Revok two-by-three metre work behind the couch,” he says. Just as the walls are covered with art, sculptural works by the likes of denHolm, Parra, Will Coles, Cleon Peterson, and KAWS are displayed throughout the apartment, though while some move between spaces others seem to take up permanent residence in a favoured spot, such as the KAWS figurine who lives beside the bathroom basin.

Nevertheless, as a wet area, the bathroom has less scope for artwork, and Dan and Carole embraced this as an opportunity bring back the dark palette that begins in the kitchen to act as a counterpoint to the abundance of white elsewhere. “Because everything else is very white and pared back to let the art do its thing, we made a deliberate decision to go with a dark colour in the bathroom so the apartment wasn’t too one-note,” Dan says. Much like the kitchen, the Mutina tiles across a total of seven different shades of dark blue were another result of Dan’s familiarity with Carole’s work, having noted them in a previous project she had designed.

These tiles were instrumental to balancing the proportions of the space, which has an extremely high ceiling. “We broke down the bathroom into horizontal elements to keep it from looking too ‘chimney’ like,” Carole says. The tiles are layered in two sections – the bottom section in charcoals (soot) and the top section in navies (ink). “The horizontal bands of tiles and paint help shorten the space and we’ve made use of mirror and wall lights to soften and expand the volume.” Another key move in the bathroom was to reduce the original two doors to one, allowing for a larger shower, laundry facilities and space around the basin for items and the previously-mentioned artwork.

In addition to art, Britomart Apartment exemplifies Dan’s love of contemporary design. When it comes to furniture, lighting and fixtures, many such as Ross Gardam’s Polar Wall light, Astra Walker tapware, Pitella door handles and Artedomus Maximum porcelain panels were all ones that Dan had become familiar with during his time in Australia. Other key pieces that also made their way back to New Zealand, either with Dan or in the care of obliging friends when visiting from Australia, included Made Measure joinery handles, a Grazia and Co bench, the vintage Giancarlo Piretti “Alky” lounge chair from Castorina and Co in Melbourne, and Volker Haug Anton lights used in the bathroom. Kiwi designers and makers are also represented, from Simon James and Resident (“my go-to NZ brands,” Dan says) to Nodi rugs and the bed, which was custom-made by a colleague in the design team at Fisher & Paykel many years ago.

Filled with such an eclectic yet curated selection of art and design, the interiors of the apartment play their supporting role with aplomb while being imbued with their own character. A testament to the trust built up between Carole and Dan over years of working together, Britomart Apartment may have had a number of past lives and the current renovation designed unconventionally over a rolling series of briefs – but the final outcome feels like what the loft was always meant to be.

The final outcome feels like what the loft was always meant to be.