A feather for a friend
“The house rests high on a hill, somewhere between town and country, land and air,” says architect Jeremy Smith of this house a few days before the jury visit. “It looks north over the city and out to Tasman Bay, yet behind [it] is forest and wilderness to the Nelson Lakes National Park and beyond.”
On our way there, I am reminded that many small communities that toe the line between hillside urban and former rural land seem to have streets like these: extremely curved, narrow, one-and-a-half-lane roads bordered by a mixture of new and established trees and with unassuming driveways leading somewhere semi-secluded, where one can only presume a house might be. They hug the cliffside, and the higher one goes, the narrower they get. Titirangi and even parts of Waiheke, Kelburn, and some of Karori — they all share this peculiar tapering, as if the path was an invitation to closeness: automotive or otherwise.
There is a
