New Zealand art collector and philanthropist Dame Jenny Gibbs is selling her Auckland home for $12.5 million.
The striking property, which is more gallery than house, sits on Paritai Drive, overlooking the waterfront. Dame Jenny is keen to make a sale and took OneRoof on an exclusive tour this week.
“This house was built specifically for art,” she told OneRoof as she pointed to the various artworks on display.
On the walls are paintings by Colin McCahon, Ralph Hotere and Gretchen Albrecht, in the garden sculpture by Phil Price and Neil Dawson.
The two enormous purpose-built art storage rooms, however, are empty. “It’s taken me 18 months to downsize. My children and adult grandchildren have quite good collections now,” Dame Jenny said.
The property at 31 Paritai, which has a CV of $12.75m, was purpose-built for Dame Jenny and her then-husband, Alan Gibbs, in the late 1980s. They needed a new home, she said, because the one they were in was overflowing with art.
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“We had art in the wardrobes, under the beds. I’m a compulsive art buyer. So this time I wanted a purpose-built home for it. We also had to have a water view, and architect David Mitchell to design it.”
Dame Jenny first listed the home for sale in October. She admits it will appeal to just a handful of buyers.
“It would be very difficult to adapt this to an ordinary family house,” she said. “We want someone to fall in love with it as it is. We’re shooting for that.”
Dame Jenny Gibbs at her home just after she was named in the 2009 Queen’s Birthday Honours. Photo / Greg Bowker
The house, completed in 1991 by architect David Mitchell, was designed primarily as an art gallery. Photo / Alex Burton
New Zealand Sotheby’s International Realty agent Karen Moore, who is marketing the property with colleague Klara Kozak, said she was working with art dealers and galleries to identify the next generation of collectors.
“Or [the buyer] could be someone in the music world,” she said, pointing to the property’s ground floor space, which has hosted orchestras and opera singers during its lifetime.
“I’ve had the Auckland Philharmonia, New Zealand Opera and, more than anyone, Auckland Art Gallery. We would have held eight or 10 fundraising functions here a year, every year. We would have 100 or 120 people seated for dinner, or theatre-style seating for a concert. They were lovely functions,” Dame Jenny said.
The triple-height gallery, lit by clerestory windows below the roof, has the family living quarters suspended within the upper floors. It has a performance platform, acoustic baffles designed by the same expert who did Auckland City’s Aotea Centre and a professional lighting system.
It also has a guest bedroom suite (one of only three in the house), offices for the legion of young artists who worked for Dame Jenny cataloguing and managing her collections and a full catering kitchen.
Dame Jenny’s brief to Mitchell was to build an art gallery, with a living space tucked into it. The building had to be a piece of art in and of itself.
The grand staircase sweeps down from the middle floor entry to the ground floor art gallery and function space. Photo / Alex Burton
The grounds of the Paritai Drive home are dotted with sculptures. Photo / Alex Burton
“We loved David’s designs, I loved working with him, loved him as an architect. Conceptually, he’s built a house surrounded by gallery space. He was sketching all the time we were talking, we discussed every inch of it,” she said, adding that in the late 1980s New Zealand was only just starting to bring in luxury materials from overseas, so she and Mitchell tracked those down.
As well as custom lighting, Mitchell, who died in 2018, sourced the array of marbles and granites lining the kitchen, offices, multiple bathrooms and flooring all through the house. He designed the built-in furniture, right down to the custom handles made of matching granites, designed the woven bronze gates around the entry and the mosaic-clad reflecting pools that wend their way past (and into) the ground floor gallery and gardens.
Dame Jenny said Mitchell went as far as designing a second underground gallery for the land they owned next door to number 31, but that was never built. The neighbouring property remained as a block of apartments for visiting artists, guests and staff – and more storage for the art.
Dame Jenny said her favourite feature is the view of the gallery. Wherever you are in the house, you can see a work of art. “David believes in rooms that don’t reveal themselves immediately, that you walk through and not see everything at once,” she said.
“It was very exciting to move in. The whole house has done exactly what I hoped it would. As you pass through, you are alive in the art all the time.”
– 31 Paritai Drive, in Orakei, Auckland, is for sale for $12.5m