An Evolved Immersion – Under Ivy by Jack McKinney Architects
Interpreted through a respectful and ecologically sensitive lens, thoughtful inserted gestures connect Under Ivy to its past and continue its lineage. Jack McKinney Architects celebrates the existing garden as the musing heart of the resulting home, protecting and reinstating landscape elements to further add to its abundance and instil a sense of calm.
Under Ivy sees the restoration and expansion of an existing Victorian-era villa, built circa 1900, that sits nestled into the bounding edge of its site. Across a generous allotment, the building almost takes a back seat to the surrounding garden and lushly established landscape. As a key feature of the home, maintaining such precious and celebrated green space was crucial. “I wanted to add to the house, but not detract from the garden,” says Jack McKinney, Founder and Director of Jack McKinney Architects. From this guiding intention, the decision was made to “cover each level of the addition with a green roof, as well as the porte cochere leading up to the garage, bringing the garden up to meet the higher levels of the house [and] creating a new relationship between the original house and the garden.” With this careful integration of garden and architecture, the linear elements are softened and blurred, as old and new become intertwined through the enfolding vegetation.
Located in the well-established enclave of St Marys Bay in Auckland, Under Ivy embodies its own offering, combining a generous site and mature garden. The thoughtful addition sits almost contained and engulfed within the landscape, as a celebration of that connection. “It’s a room that is about being surrounded by quite a rich array of foliage, which is a rare experience in this suburb,” Jack says. “Two sides of the living room are glazed to allow the garden in and to facilitate the foliage creeping over the skylights above.” The history of the home and its tumbling garden then become ensconced within the new. It is the fusing of the natural and the built with such intention that defines the unique resulting home.
Prior to the new works, the building had been in receipt of a number of alterations and additions. What remained, Jack says, “was a narrative of the formal and upright character of the original home that sits very high and vertically on the edge of the garden, potentially owned at some point by a ship captain as it looks out over the harbour.” While every house has a past, Under Ivy’s previous custodians were particularly evident in the shaping of its vestiges. Today, the house is founded on defining and retaining those elements in a contemporary, relevant residence that both recalls what has come before and allows for the creation of new connections. Maintaining the home’s original elegance, presence and accentuating its features by painting its entirety in white, the new additions feel distinctly of another era, yet are conceived through a shared approach to biophilic living.
Maintaining the home’s original elegance, presence and accentuating its features by painting its entirety in white, the new additions feel distinctly of another era, yet are conceived through a shared approach to biophilic living.
“I was inspired by Carlo Scarpa’s Villa Ottolenghi,” Jack says, “which is totally engaged with the garden surrounding it, to the point where distinguishing them becomes more ambiguous – I wanted to allow the language to change over time from the clean modernism of the living room to something more mysterious and embedded in the garden – like an architectural ruin.” The resulting form takes shape as a glass and brick pavilion in essence, referencing the nearby brick chimney feature of the existing, with lightly framed glazed elements that connect the interior with the garden visually. “Instead of building a tall addition beside the home,” explains Jack, “we decided to go low and sideways, allowing the original shape of the house to remain legible.”
The gardens and nature surrounding Under Ivy are undeniably calming and nurturing – encouraging this engagement reinforces the home as a refuge. A palette of equally calm and muted finishes aid in carving out the unique nodes within the structure, while not competing with the surrounding landscape. “The home is intended to feel very gentle and calm and becomes a play on tensions,” Jack says. “While the green roofs are in fact monstrously heavy, the ceiling below them appears light and delicate, where two peaked squares bordered by long slithers of light then appear barely supported.” The integration of light also drove key openings, with the textural qualities of the material palette aimed to respond to shifting light. “We have deep eaves that allow all of the doors to be open at any point during the day,” Jack adds, “and we wanted light deep into the interior of the building, while still feeling protected.”
In its immersion, the new addition feels deliberately part of the original home yet carves its own identity through form. Jack McKinney Architects has carefully interwoven the past and present, all the while preserving its most precious element – its garden muse.
