In the past few years, apartment and townhouse developments in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland have tended to fall into one of two camps — large and luxurious mansions in the sky, or cheaply built and developer-driven, with no eye on design. While housing of all types is badly needed in our cities, there is a distinct demand for denser housing, designed around families and communities, with environmental cred to match.
Enter Tūī Glen, Aotearoa’s first 10-Homestar-rated houses, designed and developed by Ahha’s Jimmi O’Toole and wife Charlotte, which will have zero yearly operating costs thanks to innovative use of solar and water-harvesting technology. It’s the first project from their company Good Good, which aims to develop a new kind of housing – one with humans and the environment in mind.
The couple bought the site in Birkenhead some years ago. It’s down a long driveway, and part of a significant ecological area which sits beside Kauri Glen, a reserve of ecological importance that features a high density of established kauri, some several hundred years old.
Accordingly, Ahha designed four two-storey townhouses, each with an assymetric gable and clad with a different colour of Abodo shingles – they’re playful, joyful houses with big windows and subtle curves. They sit in one corner of the site, with the balance (covered in pūriri, kōwhai, nīkau and tōtara) maintained for the collective enjoyment of the owners.
You approach the houses down a driveway of Dutch cobbles – which let water through, rather than encouraging it to speed up. There’s a shared parking area, along with gardens to grow food, and places to compost – activities designed to encourage chance encounters with neighbours.
Each house has an identical split-level layout following the contours of the land, with a generous west-facing courtyard on one side and views into the bush on the other. At ground level, you enter into a kitchen-dining space running out to the courtyard where a recycled brick wall provides privacy. Down a few steps is a sunken living space with a large window into the bush. Upstairs, the split continues: two further bedrooms and a bathroom above the kitchen space, and the main bedroom and ensuite bathroom above the living space, with the same view into the trees. At the apex of the pitched roof is a small work-from-home space.
Materials are rich, enveloping and environmentally friendly. Floors are cork or Marmoleum; walls are lined with timber. Additionally, the houses feature over-code insulation, efficient appliances, solar panels, grey-water and rainwater harvesting and low-carbon local materials. There are shared EV chargers, and 90 percent of the construction waste is intended to be diverted from landfill.
Which just goes to show: homes can be beautiful, affordable, and environmentally minded.
Tūī Glen
10 Tui Glen Road, Birkenhead
