My Account
Leigh resident Garth Falconer is one of New Zealand’s leading landscape and urban designers. He talks to Karyn Scherer about culture, commuting and creativity.
I was pretty good academically at school but my real love was art. When I got to fifth form my parents said: “That’s not a real man’s thing.” They laugh about this now, but they persuaded me to do maths and science and so on. I ended up discovering landscape architecture through a summer job. When I graduated from Lincoln in ‘87 there was virtually no work, so four of us decided we’d create our own little company in a garage in Remuera. That company was called Isthmus Group and we built it up to four offices with 48 staff. In 2004 I went to Oxford and did my Master’s in urban design, and in 2008 I left Isthmus to create Reset Urban Design, based at Princes Wharf. We started off in landscape architecture but we quickly started doing work on town centres and masterplanning of commercial centres and residential subdivisions.
Landscape architecture and urban design has been very slow to develop in NZ, but I think there’s some really interesting things starting to happen. I spoke at an international conference last year and I felt we were on par with some of the best landscape architecture in the world. In fact Reset won an international award for Judge’s Bay in Parnell. All the other projects in our category were billion-dollar projects and ours was $2.2 million. That was good but I really want us to be pushing on and doing things that are very interesting and show the richness of our environment and our creativity, because I think we’ve got a wonderful story here. I think we’re starting to see it, with creative and intellectual people like Eleanor Catton and Lorde, rather than just rugby and racehorses. I think we do things in a robust way and I think we are becoming more confident with cultural expression. New Zealand is becoming more multi-cultural; it’s becoming more feminine; it’s changing from the pre-80s culture which was male and mono-cultural.
The stuff I’m quite interested in is dynamic and interactive, spacially and sensory-wise. It’s about big ideas through to really crafted details. Matakana Village used to be a dirty timber yard with contaminated soil. We set up the Farmer’s Market, with all the water drained through rain gardens and rock filters. Those cherry trees relate to the Matthews brothers, who were horticulturalists in the early 19th century. The colour of the steps, and the seasonal colour — it’s actually quite simple.
Richard and Christine Didsbury are the reason I’m here. I started 20 years ago on the design of Brick Bay, which is their farm. I came up to look at it and I went to get a filled roll in Warkworth and I was looking in real estate agents’ windows, and I took my then-girlfriend (now my wife) Linda up to Leigh. I remember, because I was a really keen surfer, the view from the top of the hill as you drop down into Pakiri. We found a section and just fell in love with it. We built a bach, and moved up for the summer, and we didn’t go back to the city. We added to it and it’s now our family home.
I commute into Auckland four times a week, so I do a lot of miles, but I find a balance. I’m a member of the Omaha Board Riders Club and over-50s champion, and my son Fraser is also a very keen surfer. We’re down at Pakiri most days. The aspects I love about this place that make the whole commute worthwhile is the small and really interesting community we have. There’s an increasingly fascinating bunch of characters around, and the environment is incredible. The beaches, the estuaries, the parks, the food, the whole lifestyle; and it’s just getting better and better.
I worked with Alan Gibbs for several years setting up of his sculpture park out on the Kaipara. He used to fly me up in his helicopter. He’s got some very strong ideas and he wants to make it a sculpture park of international standing. We’re still involved in an ongoing conversation about what that means. He’s done some great work out there and he is opening it to the public now, which is fantastic. I was also involved in the Auckland Plan. One of the things we did was hire a helicopter for three days and flew around the Auckland region and took photographs, because Council people didn’t know the periphery of Warkworth and how it’s related to the Mahurangi, and Kaipara Flats. There is going to be radical change in Warkworth — it’s going to quadruple in size, at least. You want to keep the positive characteristics of Warkworth’s intimacy and its lovely natural setting. I think there’s some really positive things, like the retirement home coming into the centre of town. Getting our elderly out of the periphery and into our community is really important. Design changes how you live. We used to take life as it was dictated to us, but I think now we have the ability to control it.
With the Auckland Plan, Council wants to contain growth into the rural productive environment through a strategy of a hierarchy of centres. The Auckland metropolitan area will be contained through a Rural Urban Boundary, and there will be two satellites, Pukekohe and Warkworth. I actually wanted several more. I thought Helensville and Beachlands and even Wellsford could be satellites, and they could be possible developments in the future. I think Matakana could have more population, but we need public and private investment and we need good open conversations about that. There’s lots of work still to be done there.
There is quite a clear direction from Council that there is going to be encouragement of greater density and more consolidation. We’re working on a development at the moment called Redoubt Ridge, at Flat Bush, which has 172 lots and the average size is about 150-170sq m, which is very small. That contains a three-level, detached, four-bedroom house, so it is a step-change for people. We’re going through quite a difficult transition of educating people and hopefully investing in quality design to show the market: “this is what you want and what is available and achievable and more affordable”. Affordability is the big problem for Auckland’s development and there aren’t any easy silver bullets for that issue.
I’m just completing a book on urban design. I hope to have it published later this year — it’s eight years work. It’s all about the development of our towns and cities and pulling together a whole lot of information to show how rich our heritage is, and the range of possibilities people have engaged with over the years. It’s incredible what creativity New Zealanders have.
