6 minute read
Interview: Architect and advocate Julie Stout
February 25, 2022 Golden glow cast on career in architecture
Julie Stout joins an elite group as recipient of a top architects’ award. The Narrow Neck resident talks to Helen Vause about a lifetime practising and teaching – and helping shape the city.
Architect and advocate... Julie Stout at home in Narrow Neck
Looking out over Narrow Neck beach to Rangitoto from her airy, covered upstairs deck, Julie Stout grins. Yes, she says, she is very honoured indeed to be the newest recipient of the highest individual award for an architect at this stage of her career, the Gold Medal given annually by the New Zealand Institute of Architects.
Colleagues, fulsome in their praise of her contribution to the profession, consider it timely recognition for Stout, who already has a long list of awards to her name for notable projects and a great reputation for advocacy. The Flagstaff meets her during a week of celebrations. The architectural practice she is part of has long been Devonport-based, although she might be best known in the area for the striking design of her award-winning house in Old Lake Road.
But Stout’s story and projects have taken her far and wide, and involved many other houses.
As she tells it, the woman from Palmerston North had a lucky day back in the middle of her studies at the University of Auckland, when she met the late David Mitchell, an architect and lecturer who would become her partner in life and in professional practice.
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Mitchell and Stout earned acclaim and recognition in their decades of collaboration.
Stout has collected many awards herself, but working alongside Mitchell, she was part of a winning team that brought home the accolades for a portfolio of at least 15 public buildings and private houses – including two of the couple’s own homes.
Some of their most noted projects include Te Uru Waitakere Gallery and Lopdell House in West Auckland, and the Tauranga Art Gallery.
When Mitchell died in 2018, Stout acknowledges it took her time to catch her breath and realise that she could go on working without the support of her closest collaborator.
“We had worked so closely together for so long, at frst I wondered if I could carry on designing without him.
“I feel so lucky to have had the life we had together. David and I shared the same sensibilities, the same way of looking at the world.”
Some outside their offce may have wondered who had contributed what to their projects. And Mitchell himself was a Gold Medal winner in 2005. But for Stout, this latest recognition is for her, and her entire body of work. Last year, she was one of a handful of the country’s most prominent architects featured in the television series Designing Dreams.
Stout was just 25 and a new graduate when she met Mitchell, who was already established in his feld, 17 years her senior and a father of adolescent kids. He was also a keen sailor and before she knew it, Stout was happily immersed in his seafaring plans.
Mitchell it turned out, had found quite the sailor in the girl from the Manawatu – once she’d boned up fast on things nautical.
“When he put the idea of a voyage to me, I had no hesitation,” laughs Stout who has years of colourful memories of adventures alone at sea with her mate.
The couple frst took off in their boat Rogue for six months in 1988, sailing around the Pacifc Islands and frming up plans for going further afeld. Happily, their professional track records ensured clients and future work also lay ahead.
That trip was mostly recorded, the couple taking it in turns to write as they went. Much of the detail would scare the average landlubber further into the corner of their sofa. But as it has been for others who tackle big seas on small boats, the truly terrifying bits seemed to be erased the next morning by sunshine, calm waters and safe harbours.
They recorded grappling with terrible weather, huge seas, busted gear, sleepless nights, sheer terror, near misses with solid objects and, often, dark little doubts.
Stout wrote in one section on the homeward leg: “By now we were totally exhausted. Two hours sleep every 24 hours and two light snacks a day for 12 days, coupled with the nerve-shredding task of beating into the sea was almost too much. Always the fear of something going wrong that you couldn’t cope with. Lying down below at night I was totally convinced that if I took my clothes off to go to sleep then we would hit a container, so I would remain fully dressed... Outside, Rogue would be straight and true, in total control of herself.”
Stout always got herself back together, and the scary bits fell away at the promise of another sea voyage with Mitchell.
Back home once more, they were in demand for plenty of exciting projects. But the wanderlust won out and, in 1992, they headed off again through the Pacifc, then to Hong Kong.
Stout laughs at the memory of tying up in a nook in a Hong Kong harbour they’d be calling home for months, fnding their land legs and scuttling into Marks & Spencer department store in search of suits.
Smartly kitted out, off they went into the city to fnd jobs. Stout remembers just ‘getting on with it’ to meet briefs for apartments and shopping malls she can no longer recall.
“But it was an amazing time working there, living on the boat.”
Then the call came for another amazing job in Auckland. A gallery this time, the contemporary wing of the Auckland Art Gallery. The work kept coming, and Mitchell and Stout won national awards.
But once again, the duo departed, taking the boat back to Hong Kong and through Asian waters. In 1999, they sailed across the Indian Ocean and eventually into the Mediterranean.But in Turkey they discovered David had prostate cancer – news that brought them home.
Julie recalls discovering Narrow Neck, and the site of her home, a few years later after venturing over the bridge nearly 20 years ago to meet a client. It was, she says, the beginning of their very happy commitment to a life in the neighbourhood – featuring swims, walks and many new friendships.
“I mean, just look out there at the beauty of it all. Who wouldn’t want to live here, by the sea?”
Ever the advocate for leading development on sound design principle, Stout has always spoken out, notably as chair of Urban Auckland.
With that group, she led the charge in a campaign through to the High Court to successfully chase off the development threat of built expansion into the Waitemata Harbour, forcing a rethink on the future of Auckland ports.
While no one foresaw the growth of Auckland, says Stout, people now understand urban issues and intensifcation.
The worry is, she says, the city’s future development seems to be in the hands of planners and managers. A design-led entity with a vision of how the city could be and a hub that could push and promote public understanding on how our future city could look is urgently needed, she says. Stout wants to be part of putting this entity in place, ensuring that creative people have a voice in future development.
Her 2021 Gold Medal will give her opinions even more heft in the conversation.
