In the 1880s, the Reverend John Kinder built a gardener’s cottage at the bottom of his estate on Arney Road, Remuera in Tāmaki Makaurau: a small wooden building with a central hallway and modest proportions, looking out over a quintessential view of the Waitematā.
In 1917, Kinder’s descendents commissioned architect Richard Atkinson Abbott — known for his work on Auckland Grammar School, and the obelisk at the top of Maungakiekie One Tree Hill — to rework the cottage for a daughter who had recently become enamoured with arts and crafts on a trip to the United States. And in 2022, new owners – only the fourth family to own it in 140 years – commissioned Megan Edwards and landscape designer Zoë Carafice to rework the house: the third major intervention into a home stretching back almost 150 years. No pressure.
The clients bought the house just months after completing a new home nearby, also to a design by Edwards with a garden by Carafice. The designers have now collaborated on a number of projects in which garden and house were designed in tandem. “They invited me over for a gin and tonic to break the news,” recalls Edwards. “And then they showed me pictures of the house they’d bought and I could immediately see why.” For Carafice, there was another layer: she’d worked on the garden years before with the previous owners, who had a love of roses. “I knew the old garden and loved it, so it was a matter of getting my head around people I knew and a garden I knew in a completely different context,” she says.
At the time, the gracious old house, with its deep verandahs, featured a red roof and dark-painted shingles. It sits beautifully on a corner site, alongside an established pōhutukawa. I remember when it went on the market: I thought it was one of the most beautiful houses I’d ever seen. For one owner, it reminded her of the airy bungalows with wide eaves that she grew up in on tea plantations in Sri Lanka. “I used to make a detour to drive past it,” she says. “I used to say if it ever came on the market we would buy it.”
The only trouble? Its layout was a little old-fashioned. “We used to laugh because it had this huge old dining room with this massive table – we’d go and eat in there about once a week.” she recalls. The kitchen was in the back and there was a formal living room at the front. A bedroom had the best view, looking over the harbour.
The clients are proficient cooks and hospitable hosts with seven grown-up children between them. The house needed to be sociable: the kitchen had to be at its heart and it needed multiple living spaces so it could expand and contract to accommodate two or 12 people. After a year of living there, they came to Edwards with an idea: the kitchen needed to be at the front of the house, with an enclosed verandah turning into a family room and dining room; the existing dining room should become the primary bedroom with a new ensuite and wardrobe replacing a scullery; and the stairs should move from one side of the plan to the other, opening up the middle of the house. In effect, these changes would create a string of north-facing living spaces overlooking the view. They also wanted a pool.
The reshuffle meant altering almost every room in the historic house, including the panelled front entry, which was specifically mentioned in the heritage listing. Edwards was initially a little taken aback. “It was already a lovely house and this was a lot of change,’” she says. “But after a while, and trying a few different approaches, I could see it made total sense.” Key to the plan was a new staircase with a skylight above, which reaches through all three levels, from the basement to the attic bedrooms, and brings light into the middle of the house.
The previous owners and their architect had chosen to mimic original details when they extended downstairs and into the roof in the early 2000s – a successful intervention which extended the house while preserving the main elements of the 1917 arts-and-crafts renovation. Edwards chose a very different approach, adding a 21st-century language of painted steel, glass and timber to create a transparent, open stair structure in the middle of the house. Many architects – and many heritage lovers – would not have been brave enough to make that move.
It’s an approach she has taken in many villas and bungalows around Tāmaki Makaurau over the past couple of decades – deft, clear-eyed interventions that add a new layer to an old house through fine details and generous spaces. Though, normally, it’s on prosaic, tired old houses. Edwards wasn’t daunted by taking the same approach with what can only be described as a taonga. “You make it obvious what you’ve done, and you really treasure the things that are good and old, and play them up,” she says, “and what’s new, you make obvious too. The upper and lower floors are not original to the house, and the stair makes that clear.”
The work took 18 months, during which builder Ken Brawn – who took on the project as his last swansong before retirement – took apart the panelling, numbering each piece and storing it before methodically putting it back together, creating secret doors to preserve the sense of the panelled entry. On the bottom level, every room changed subtly. Upstairs, two attic bedrooms were expanded with a more generous dormer.
Carafice and landscaper Will Ivey took a similar approach outside. “We spent days lifting the old garden and heeling plants into other beds, and then at the end of the job we lifted back in all the bulbs and little treasures,” she says. “There was an enormous amount of hands-on work, rather than just clearing it and starting again.” Placing the pool was key to the landscaping: while many would have dropped it on the front lawn, to the north, overlooking the view, Megan felt it should be tucked into the back of the site, replacing a raised lawn in the rear courtyard. For this, Carafice designed a balustrade of green-painted steel with a lightly arts-and-crafts pattern, and continued the use of existing Paradise Stone in the courtyard.
There’s a dance to this intervention. It feels established, refined, all dark timber panelling and arts-and-crafts details, yet it’s casual, open and friendly. “Having that more open stair knits the house together and calms the whole thing down – having the light coming in. I was a bit nervous about getting this new thing right, being in the middle of the house, but because it’s set behind the entry, it doesn’t take away from what was there.”
You approach the house through the hedge and a white-painted gate, between two tōtara trees that are slowly forming an arch, and along a gently curving path surrounded by a wildflower garden that changes through the year. The flow works now: you come up onto the verandah and you see the clients in the kitchen. The door’s open before you get to it, the tea’s on and there might be cake. “It used to be that you’d trail through to the back,” says Edwards, “and never really stop in the front. That whole space is really comforting now.”
From the kitchen, you look right through the house, a diagonal view that takes in the stairs, garden room and pool. The new main bedroom is tucked away on this level, private. The formal living room has barely changed. The airy family and dining room is casual. You leave the kitchen, down the hall and into an airy new living room that overlooks the pool: from the sofa, you’re almost at eye level with the water. It all feels very natural, unaffected. “They were completely committed to doing the right thing,” says Edwards of her clients. “They are definitely good owners for that place.”
