To listen to Jeremy Taylor's playlist inspired by this house, click here. Back in the 1980s, when planning rules were looser than they are now, there was a brief moment where post-modernism took hold in central Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, often on small, subdivided sites around the inner-west. Anyone who has attempted in recent years to build anything other than a villa in these areas should look away now because, for a time, it was possible to subdivide tiny sites and create interesting houses on resulting sections. We won’t talk about their weathertightness – that’s another story, and possibly the reason very few have survived. But we will talk about how they made good spaces out of small, urban sites.
Anyway, sometime in about 1988, one plucky owner did just that at the end of a very quiet, very old street in Ponsonby. The site featured a turn-of-the-century brick wall that had originally been part of a stables. They turned to architect Graham Lane who created a post-modern house with a barrel-vault roof and gull-wing coverings over the upstairs decks. There was open-plan living downstairs, running out to a courtyard. In 1994, Carl and Rosanne Madsen bought the place: it had everything they needed; they loved the ivy-covered brick wall and the sense of retreat.
A mere 15 years later, they started to realise that, while the house possessed many qualities they liked – it turns its back to the street and looks into a private, north-facing courtyard – they could improve it. They turned to old friend Richard Naish, of RTA Studio, to design an alteration that would give them more upstairs space. They loved the plan, but not long after, the GFC hit, the Auckland housing market took a nosedive, and they hit pause.
Eleven years later, they approached Naish again, ready to push go. “Their brief had changed a little bit,” he says. “We were looking at it with fresh eyes.” By 2020, planning rules had become arduous indeed – but this site was a doozy. It was built on a cross-lease, in a character zone, with tight controls on site coverage. Any design scheme would need to retain 65 percent of the house in order to be considered a renovation and not a new-build. Consent was contingent on meeting a set of rules designed for Victorian villas, rather than 1980s plaster boxes.
The plan would need to address privacy issues on three sides and, partway through, they discovered that, because they were close to the neighbours, they’d have to take fire-proofing measures on two boundaries. “We had to jump through the hoops with the planning – it fits the same envelope and the same position on the site, but it’s essentially a new house.”
The bonus? The Madsens weren’t interested in ticking boxes. They didn’t come with the obligatory laundry list of functions that might theoretically improve their resale value. “I think they’d kind of grown into the house, and the house had grown into them,” says Naish. After decades in the place, they knew its limits, but they also knew its delights. They weren’t hung up on whether it had the requisite number of bathrooms or that it has no off-street parking, but they did like how easy it was to look after and what a retreat it was, and they had no intent on leaving.
They also knew they didn’t want something ordinary. There is a lot of boring in our central cities: it’s easy to buy, if you can afford it. If you want something interesting, you’d better build it yourself. “At least we’ve got a polarising house,” said Carl when he opened the door to let me in. “Some people get it, some people don’t – but we’d rather that than something boring.”
RTA’s scheme left the ground floor largely untouched. The layout works well, with entry into the middle of the space through a large front door. The kitchen is ahead of you at the end of the space. To your left, there’s a living area with doors opening to the courtyard, which wraps the house on two sides. To your right, there’s a small bathroom and a bedroom which, in its original iteration, was the main one but is now really a kind of guest room/media room. A flight of stairs leads to the first floor.
Naish’s big move was to completely overhaul the top level. He’s created a generous bedroom suite that incorporates a completely covered outdoor verandah, office, main bedroom, ensuite bathroom and walk-in wardrobe. “It’s like a really generous apartment, but a standalone house,” says the architect. “It’s small, but they’ve got so much amenity – two bedrooms, two living areas, two bathrooms, a covered deck and a big courtyard.”
Internally, nothing survived the rebuild, except for the concrete slab. The new scheme is simple, stripped-back, featuring white walls, basalt floors, waxed steel and – most dramatically – aged brass on the front door and in other select places.
Outside, Naish’s design features rough-sawn vertical timber Abodo weatherboards, with very small, square windows with solid brass shrouds to the street and the neighbours. Viewed from outside the house is inscrutable, mysterious; the windows are just enough to let light in, and placed to create very particular moments. On the inside, in the courtyard and the private spaces, those small windows give way to massive openings – sliding doors that pull back entirely from a corner of the living room, dissolving the line between outside and in. Upstairs, sliders open onto the outdoor living space, which can be entirely protected from the wind and rain if needed.
That dichotomy is expressed in the Abodo cladding, too. Somewhere along the line, they realised the house would need to deal with fire-rating, which meant painting the timber with intumescent paint. The clients had other ideas, having emotionally committed to the idea of natural rough-sawn timber. So, on the public-facing elevations, the house is painted in Resene Double White Pointer; on the private-facing sides, looking over the courtyard, it’s natural timber. “You can post-rationalise it,” says Naish, “but I do quite like the idea that the house presents differently to the street and to the courtyard.”
The build took a year, and the Madsens moved back in 2022, taking delight in the responses of neighbours. One evening, they were sitting out on their covered deck above the street when they heard people outside. “What have they done?” said one. The couple tried not to laugh. “That’s exactly the reaction we were after,” says Carl. “We wanted something different, not beige, and we definitely got it.”
1. Entry
2. Living/Dining
3. Pergola
4. Kitchen
5. Study
6. Bathroom
7. Laundry
8. Balcony
9. Sitting
10. Bedroom
11. Ensuite
12. Wardrobe
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