Why Architects and Builders Clash | Ben Lloyd #93

But let's talk about this project first.

So how did this project

come to be? So this project came to us via a builder that we'd worked with before.

And we have generally done residential projects and it's his father's site.

So it's a car wash facility that he's had for 40 years.

um and through that 40 years there's never been any kind of office space there's never been a bathroom for staff or anything they have to rush across to the mall to to go to the toilet um and then so so ben approached us with with this site it had in one tucked away in one corner about 35 40 square meters of available land to to try and put an office on um and to store all of their their materials as well so quite an irregular shaped site as well.

So we ended up with quite a sort of tiny little wedge in the back there.

And it was, I guess, an opportunity for us to be a little bit sculptural and fun and try and bring a little bit of clear sort of architecture to what is a bit of a crazy context.

Yeah.

So for the listeners that can't see it, how would you describe the building itself? Because you you arrive and it's like a car wash and cars driving around and like it's chaos.

And then sort of dipped into the corner.

It was like, there's a beautiful, like kind of architectural piece.

Yeah.

So it's, I guess it's, it is like a little wedge building back in the, back in sort of the corner of the building of the site.

Sorry.

So we've tried to make it as sculptural as possible, as robust as possible, certainly on the ground level where it is all made of concrete and then trying to draw up like a floating stair up to, I guess, a little apartment almost floating above and

that

then goes, I guess, northwest over the site and then the owner of the car wash can sit up here and kind of purvey his land really.

yeah yeah

you can be sort of like the king of the castle

up here there's windows everywhere you're like looking down making sure everyone's right downstairs and it opens up to a nice um uh just a nice kind of um balcony area there as well like a deck area so it's cool it's like a really cool space it's a real surprising space because it just seems like it's a very i mean the first time i ever saw it i was like um wow how you know it seems like they've over capitalized on on this space this yard obviously the land value this yard is is it would be a lot anyway it's probably not the highest and best use um having it as a car wash to start with but um what was the idea behind like going all out because i think i talked to um the builder and he mentioned that was it was going to start with just a little shack or something

and then yeah so when when they came to us like well i guess prior to coming to us there was there was thought of just putting a skyline garage on the site um which i'm pleased they didn't yeah um uh Essentially it was an opportunity for Ben the builder also to showcase some of his skills.

It's going to end up being his office and a bit of storage downstairs as well.

Stepping back there was the main driver for this site was to actually store everything on site that they use for the car wash but previously it in the owner's garage and some shed scattered around Auckland.

So every time they needed a product, they had to race to a storage shed and come back.