St Heliers House, Auckland real estate, New Zealand modern home photos, North Island NZ residence

St Heliers House in Auckland

17 June 2025

Architects: Young+Richards

Location: Auckland, North Island, New Zealand

Photos by David Straight

St Heliers House, New Zealand

The St Heliers House project brief was to provide for updated living, the tired compartmentalized existing home on the site needed to be replaced in order to work a fresh with the challenging steep south facing site and a family’s changing needs. 

The site is tucked behind a busy beach strip in a quiet unassuming street, revealing itself to its tightly held neighbours as two simple white cubes seemingly cascading down the hill to come to rest on a stone plinth base.
 

Conceptually the house is an architectural exploration into a series of dichotomies between which lived experience is celebrated through spatial sensation.

Subtle cues invite you to one side of the stone plinth, a stepped path then guides you as if exploring a dry ravine. Entry is made on the oblique, gently slipping you into the heart of the home.
 

The house dissipates around you into experiential living over three levels celebrating the rituals of daily life with form, void, light, shadow, mass and levitation.

Being sited on a steep south facing site, the home is sculpted as a device for capturing and experiencing light. The resulting geometry is still but transformational, anchored but active, structured but organic.

Rising though to the top level gathering spaces embrace their landscape and celebrate intimacy, calm and exuberance.

The Clients and team worked tirelessly throughout to maintain the conceptual design intent, a plethora of architectural precedents and spatial theories have been explored in this commission, but the result really is just a great all encompassing retreat style home in which we hope wonderful family experiences can play out effortlessly. 