Repeat clients are often the best clients—especially if they’re not just asking you to repeat yourself. In 2013, New Zealand firm Fearon Hay Architects completed a renovation for Wall Fabrics, an importer and distributor of fashion textiles. The success of that project, located on the fringes of downtown Auckland, helped spark a regeneration of the area. Presented with an enticing offer from a developer, owner Roger Wall sold that space. He turned to Fearon Hay once again, and found a similar warehouse building to accommodate a similar program of office, showroom, and storage. Yet this revamp would take a very different approach.
The existing building for the new space, positioned at another part of the city’s periphery with very different site conditions, was a long, low structure whose south end culminated in a dreadful two-story pink and green stuccoed confection that would seem to hold little promise. But its larger footprint—30 percent more area—would support the growing business, as well as Wall’s other creative ventures. And in the hands of Fearon Hay—whose award-winning track record of adapting historic and industrial buildings includes numerous warehouse conversions (its own workspace among them), the transformation renders the original structure unrecognizable.
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