Moir Street in Mount Victoria, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, is historic, and highly prized by local heritage advocates. It’s very narrow and very pretty, all frills and frou-frou and roses. Yet, it’s not pristine. The houses, including the one you see here, have been highly modified over the years. Furthermore, the next street down is semi-commercial, with a line of buildings containing businesses and apartments: directly behind this house is a three-storey 1930s warehouse, all concrete, brickwork and steel-framed windows.
The jumble of eras, materials and buildings, not to mention some established trees, make for a pleasant place to live. The setting also gave Anne Kelly and Karl Wipatene of a.k.a Architecture some creative freedom when it came to reworking an 1890s cottage here. “It doesn’t feel as Mt Vic as a lot of Mt Vic because you’ve got that building behind, which is lovely,” says Kelly. “You’re not looking into everyone’s backyards – and having a really long site helped as well.”
Kelly and Wipatene are no strangers to renovations of wonky old wooden houses. Starting with their own home in Mount Victoria, they’ve completed numerous reworks around the suburb and beyond. Their deft, often concise interventions always manage to preserve the soul of the old and combine it with something new, while creatively incorporating all the practicalities a modern client might expect. So when it came to this 87-square-metre cottage, they were undaunted. “It was the classic,” says Kelly. “Just a very small classic.”
The original house sits right at the front of the site, its face to the street. It has an unusual double-gable roof that runs across it, rather than front to back – though the gables aren’t identical. Before the reworking, the cottage had two bedrooms, a bathroom and a living space, descending through the house under a variety of diminishing ceiling heights. “There was some weird stuff going on here,” says Kelly, laughing.
It’s a familiar story: owners Karen and James Fairhall bought the place as a couple, and loved its vibe. The garden was private and the house was pretty. Then they had a child, Lachie, now five, and by the time Karen was pregnant with Maeve, now three, they had run out of room, and called in Kelly.
Kelly’s plan, executed by the team at Hodson Construction, lightly reworked the original house to accommodate an ensuite and convert the former living area and kitchen into a spare room and a media room. It’s an undertaking she describes as “squishing bits in”, though it’s more intelligent than that. They didn’t worry too much about making it perfect, leaving wonks in the hallway and other imperfections of the 130-year-old house untouched. The approach was helped by previous owners who had installed generous storage in the main bedroom – Kelly was happy to keep that.
Then, out the back, she designed a 73-square-metre kitchen-dining-living wing that stretches along the southern boundary. The extension sits at ground level, a flight of steps down from the original house. With a brick base and a trapezoidal steel top, it’s pulled down at the edge to meet height-to-boundary rules and obviate the need for neighbours’ consent. “We talked about brick quite early on, responding to what was going on behind us,” she says. “It was about making it different enough from the original but still respecting the original form.”
To connect old and new, she drew inspiration from the cottage’s unusual double gable, breaking down the new wing with two offset roof forms that pop up above the kitchen and living space. In between, there are lower ceilings over a scullery and what is jokingly referred to as a dining cave. This space forms a soft, warm retreat in the middle of the open-plan living area.
The intervention works on multiple levels. The long wing closes the site off to the south, opens it up to the sun and establishes two distinct spaces in a relatively small house, incorporating two living rooms. It also creates multiple outdoor spaces: mornings in the courtyard, afternoons on the deck, and back to the courtyard when it gets too hot. Kelly might describe the approach as “squishing bits in” but there’s no evidence of that. Rather, every space is just as big as it needs to be, and highly functional.
Now, you step from the cottage’s painted floors onto a set of polished concrete steps (following the line of the original hall) and into the kitchen, under the first of the angled roofs. Past that, there’s the dining cave, its lowered ceiling lined with roasted ash, which merges into an extensive pelmet. At night, curtains wrap the whole space for extra coziness. The living area sits at the very end of the extension, below the second angled roof.
Materials are simple and hard-working: polished concrete, timber, plasterboard, aluminium windows. The bricks were a motley collection left over from other building jobs, now painted to make them consistent. Trapezoidal steel wraps the southern boundary, chosen to keep costs down. The kitchen is straightforward, though highly customised. “James was amazing at kitchen design,” says Kelly of her dentist client’s attention to detail. “I’d send drawings over and he’d come back with measurements that were down to the millimetre – 213mm high, to fit six plates.”
It all feels airy, yet grounded. Glazed sliding doors open onto a new deck and the garden, but Kelly also specified a solid aluminium slider. When open, it’s an airy link to the courtyard; when closed, it’s more like a wall. All of this creates an intimate connection with the land that the house didn’t have before. High windows bring in light and unexpected views: trees, a bit of sky, a piece of an old building. “It’s gorgeous,” says Karen. “Sitting on the couch, you look out at the neighbours’ trees, looking up through greenery.”
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