Pac Studio’s Sarosh Mulla jokes that his parents-in-law lucked out when it came to the range of professions in the family. “It’s a consistent refrain that they wound up with only one trade available,” he says. It’s true: they’re long on architecture graduates, with no fewer than four. Sarosh’s partner Kathy is also an architect, and Kathy’s sister Claire O’Shaughnessy trained in the discipline, before switching to landscape architecture, as did Claire’s husband Nick McKay, before he became an urban designer. So, when it came to renovating Claire and Nick’s house in Ōwairaka Mount Albert, Tāmaki Makaurau there was always going to be a lot of chat. “They’re architecture-savvy and they understand the big picture,” says Sarosh. “But they also know where the costly bits are.”
Claire and Nick bought the 100-square-metre bungalow in 2018. Tucked down a long driveway, on the back of a cross-lease site, it was simple, and much more appealing than the comparably priced townhouses available in the area. It has a flat, north-facing backyard with great volcanic soil, and it’s ideally located between cycle paths and a train station. “It’s a 1940s plaster box and it had the smallest amount of character we could cope with – and afford,” says Claire. “It’s just a humble bach box,” Nick adds, “and that became a really important mindset for us.”
The only issue? Almost everything was in the wrong spot. The bathroom was disproportionately big and dominated the northern corner and the living space was on the eastern side. “Where you wanted to sit and be connected to the garden was where the washing machine was, and a blank wall,” says Sarosh. “It had a really great north-facing garden but the connection to it was stuffed.”
After living with the house for five years, the couple called on the team at Pac Studio to rework the place with a clear brief. The house required a wholesale rearrangement for modern life, plus an extra toilet and practical spaces, and a significant upgrade to insulation and heating. Sustainability is of the utmost importance to Nick and Claire, so the reworked house would rely on two large water tanks, only switching to the town supply when needed.
They wanted to reuse as much of the house as possible, but they were okay with it being gutted and rearranged. Original tawa floorboards were moved around to patch holes, interior doors were repurposed and almost all the timber windows and doors were salvaged. “The idea was that we’ve got a really bullet-proof roof here – it’s monopitch and tin,” says Sarosh. “We had enough floor area, but everything was in the wrong place except for the kitchen.”
He briefly contemplated adding five square metres to the plan for a bigger living room, but the costs far outweighed the benefits. “It was way more expensive, it changed the whole timeline, and I don’t know if it would have changed the way they live,” he says. Instead, he focussed on fitting everything inside the original walls and keeping the existing windows in place. The only major changes happened on the north-western side, where they added a series of bifold doors that opened the entire space up to a big deck with pergolas running out to the garden. “When you do that, you unlock the ability to do it really well,” says Sarosh of working within the existing envelope. “You can choose the nice tiles and get the built-in cabinetry and the nice wooden joinery.” You can also do it quickly: builder Ben Kevey-Maiden and his team from New Wave Construction finished the place in just four months.
The redesign placed the main bedroom on the north-eastern side, and the kids’ rooms to the south-west. At the centre of the house, there’s an excellent family bathroom. Colour-blocked in green, it features a fully tiled bath-shower with an extra-wide edge for ultimate relaxation. “It’s sized for a Penguin Classic and a wine glass,” says Sarosh. Doors connect the bathroom to both the hallway and the main bedroom’s walk-in wardrobe. Next to the bathroom is what Nick and Claire refer to as “the gross room”: a utility space housing the laundry, a second toilet and floor-to-ceiling storage. The living areas lie at the end of the hall, spanning the width of the house with full-height doors opening to the backyard. The kitchen stayed as it was: it had been installed just before the family moved in and no one could justify demolishing it. Instead, it was wrapped in plastic while the rest of the house was reworked around it.
In the living room, Sarosh has created a space that feels distinct from the rest of the room, with built-in joinery encompassing a long, squishy banquette big enough for the whole family, and custom cabinetry for books, records and art. Deep drawers below contain much-needed storage. “I always think of Nick as being the role model in how to enjoy life,” says Sarosh. “He loves his records, he’s constantly reading, and they have some great art – so this was a place where you could do all of that.” There’s also a wood burner, which anchors the room, something that was lacking. “There was no place that said ‘I’m the centre of the house, gather around me,’” says Sarosh. “And Nick has got himself a particularly beautiful axe.”
The final layer was colour. Not for this house the customary tones of beige and white. “We bring an openness to colour, and our clients often throw down something but don’t know how to get it to a final scheme,” says Sarosh of Pac’s approach. “We’re trying to build a language so we can talk about chroma, saturation and light intensity, and how a colour wheel works, so we can get into more sophisticated conversations about that stuff.”
In this case, Claire and Nick’s thinking started with the garden, which led them to yellow and blue, rather than green. “We love the garden and it’s always been a pretty open kind of house,” says Claire. “We said we felt like the house was a gazebo, or the working house for the garden, so a lot of the colours Sarosh started talking about were beehive colours.” Nick and Claire started testing some schemes in Photoshop based on what they’d seen around the neighbourhood. One was cream and yellow; another blue and white. Somewhere along the line, they accidentally combined yellow and blue, which Sarosh insisted they run with. “He’s pretty persuasive like that,” jokes Claire.
The scheme is cheerful and warm, without being overbearing. Outside, the original plaster walls are painted a pale blue, with trims a pale yellow and doors a richer, yolkier yellow that continues onto the pergolas. Inside, the walls are pale grey and all new cabinetry is a rich maroon red. There’s no white. “That’s what makes it feel calm,” says Sarosh. “I always think a bright white can be quite confronting. As soon as you go away from that, it makes your eye able to appreciate the other colours around it.”
On a hot summer’s day, the cicadas are out and sunshine pours into the living space. The connection out through the tall yellow doors to the covered deck and the garden is immediately arresting. Ask the couple what the best thing about the place is and they say “the doors” in unison. “We thought we needed more space, but pushing out was just so astronomically expensive,” says Nick. “These give us that intermediary space, and it makes us think we’ve got more room, but we didn’t extend it at all.”
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