They say the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is today. We all know what they mean by that: time is something you can’t get back. And when it comes to architecture – most particularly, our inhabitation of a building or a house – time is the one thing you can’t manufacture. So it is with the home of fashion designer Kate Sylvester and her husband and business partner Wayne Conway, who bought a solid if uninspired 1950s brick-and-tile house overlooking Meola Reef in the then-up-and-coming suburb of Westmere, Tāmaki Makaurau back in 2000.
At the time, Westmere was something of a backwater; its suburban feel no match for the charmingly historic neighbouring suburbs of Herne Bay and Grey Lynn. “The whole area was undiscovered,” says Conway. “You could see the house was well built and had good bones – and it was waterfront, and I couldn’t believe we could buy on the waterfront.” Back then, the house was made up of small boxy rooms, and it turned its back on the expansive garden and water views. There’s a dog park there now, but in the 50s, when it was built, that site was a dump, and who wants to look at the dump? The couple immediately set to the house, opening up a couple of spaces and doing a small kitchen renovation. Then, in 2007, with three young boys now on the scene, they commissioned close friend and architect Belinda George to rework the spaces, adding much-needed bedrooms and two bathrooms to create a hard-working family home. “It needed to be a real family home that really functioned,” says Sylvester now. “We knew we didn’t want generic white spaces – we wanted the warmth of timber and the surprise of colour.”
Complicating the rework was a sewer line, which runs squarely across the middle of the site. Building past that would have been expensive and difficult. Instead, it gave them a line to build up to. George’s design worked within the footprint, opening things up to create free-flowing, family-friendly living spaces with a new L-shaped kitchen at the heart of it all. Floor-to-ceiling sliding timber doors opened to a new deck. Downstairs in the basement, George designed three bedrooms, a bathroom and a laundry connected by a light-filled staircase that brings all-day sun into the living spaces.
Throughout, George introduced a distinctive language of dark-stained timber, bagged brick, walnut panelling, and cabinetry in tones of green and blue chosen by Conway and Sylvester, loosely acknowledging the home’s mid-century roots. The living spaces are expansive, centred around a brick-framed fireplace, the generous kitchen and a long table designed by Conway. “We both come from families where sitting around the table was a big thing, and a lot of families don’t do that anymore,” he says. “We always sit at the table, and the house was built around that idea.”
By 2021, with the kids at university and travelling, the couple felt ready to finish the house. They’d never touched the front, which featured a dank garage and a steep driveway; and the back deck, which faces west, was too exposed to the sun. Sylvester jokes that at the height of summer they would get so hot they’d jump in the pool and then cook, dripping wet, in their togs. After briefly chatting with George about the next phase, the couple decided they knew what they wanted and felt comfortable to design it themselves. Conway has form here: he’s also a trained designer and has been designing the brand’s physical spaces, including multiple stores and the workroom, for years. “Everything but the clothes is Wayne,” says Sylvester. “All our brand identity, all our store fitouts – that’s all Wayne’s design.”
Conway designed a new double garage to sit at the front of the site, on the street, and extended the front of the house to create a new entry and a room you might think of as a breakfast room, which connects to the front door and the kitchen. After mucking around with various roof forms, he decided there was really only one option: rebuild the original hipped roof into a simple gable and match that gable on the new garage. In between, there’s a sunken courtyard which leads to a room that used to be the garage, is currently a gym and will soon be a home office. Out the back, the gable roof extends over the deck, with heaters for winter and sunshades for summer, forming an outdoor space they can use year-round.
Now, from the street, you’re presented with two abstracted bagged-brick gables. There’s a beautiful garden and a path that leads to a new front porch and a solid cedar door. Inside, the living spaces and the kitchen are very much as they were, albeit refreshed after 15 years of family life. New spaces pick up from George’s original design cues, including the deep-set, dark-stained timber windows, cedar sarking and walnut cabinetry.
The new breakfast room is, frankly, delightful. It catches morning sun through generous glazing overlooking the street, there’s a built-in window seat that surveys the garden, bookshelves with cookbooks, and a particularly excellent guest WC tucked in behind a sarked cedar wall. In some ways, this space was what drove the whole design. They’d noticed, over the years, how much sun came into the kitchen, and they were comfortable looking out over the street – Sylvester was adamant they wouldn’t build a front wall. It’s a suburban cul-de-sac and the garden provides a psychological screen. “We use this room so much because we spent so much time thinking about it,” says Wayne. “It’s a gem. It’s our favourite room in the house.”
Now, the house is about to undertake yet another evolution. Next year, Sylvester and Conway will wind up the fashion label they’ve run for 30-plus years. They’re not sure precisely what they’ll do next, but sometime in 2025 Sylvester will move her workroom downstairs to two of the bedrooms, leaving one room for guests and the gym for its intended purpose: an office. “Next year we’ll be done and dusted,” says Sylvester. “And then it’s a whole new world – a whole new life.”
1. Garage
2. Entry
3. Sunroom
4. Kitchen
5. Dining
6. Deck
7. Living
8. Bedroom
9. Ensuite
10. Laundry
11. Bathroom
12. Office
