Featherston House

Text by Mary Featherston from Design for Living: Grant & Mary Featherston, p. 150, 2018

Robin's design not only responded to our curious functional requirements but also reflected us - our personalities and our way of being in the world together. A fellow architect said that Robin had a deep understanding of the psyche of his clients. He certainly was a marvellous listener and ever-curious, always seeking better ways of doing things: ‘to do the essential … but to express the human sprit’. I think he captured our way of being in the world but also perhaps a more universal transformative quality.

The house is quite anonymous from the exterior it is essentally about interior space. Working with a minimal palette of common materials and simple forms Robin created a variety of spaces by the way he combined these elements to articulate space. He had a strong sense of the emotional content of spaces and one can feel the way the spaces work on us and those who visit the house. Each platform has its own discrete ambience, created by its elevation above the garden, its sense of enclosure or openness, its light and acoustic quality. Some spaces feel more intimate, others expansive and grand. The levels are connected so that one moves through the volume of the space-through a four-dimensional experience in space and time. The house is very responsive to its natural context. It is constantly changing, not only through the activities within but also in response to the environment within which it is immersed - noises on the roof, wind, rain, hail, light coming and going, smells of garden freshly watered, and all with the constant backdrop of nature through the window wall. It is a very dynamic and sensory space - alive.

With innovative design and risk-taking there are bound to be failures as well as creative achievements. Robin was ever an experimentalist and our roof has certainly been an ongoing challenge, not to say nightmare. The translucency of the roof was central to Robin's concept for the house, but he did not know how to achieve it The initial version using translucent corrugated fibreglass with fibreglass batts underneath was a disaster. Happily technology has caught up with Robin's idea and polycarbonate sheets with high insulation properties prevent condensation but also let through a lot of light.

I think good architecture is about creating possibilities and Robin designed a highly creative environment which encourages innovation playfulness and pleasure. It is at once formal and informal and creates a connectedness between family work and nature, areas of our lives which are important to us. The indeterminate nature of the platform areas has accommodated many different functions - weddings, formal dinners, design studio, photographic studio, prototype workshop and a place for the end of life. It has been a most wonderful playground for many children, our own and others - with the addition of balustrades. Children of all ages have made and launched tissue-paper hot-air balloons, swung on six-metre-long swings and built endless fantasy constructions from a set of large building blocks. It has enabled me to follow my passionate interest in children and how they interact with their environment.

The wonder to me is that the house is a bold architectural statement with a strong cohering idea and yet is also simple, even frugal, in its use of materials and forms. It is a serene harmonious environment and a beautiful, respectful container for us and all our stuff, the treasures of our lives It is a house that has evolved over many years as buildings do. We have made and are still making changes. The workshop became a kitchen with stronger links to living areas and an area was enclosed under the studio platform to create better storage for prototype materials. Each time we made a change I wondered aloud what Robin would think Grant always said that Robin would understand because he understood that buildings need to evolve … sometimes they are even improved.