The owners of this two-bedroom home in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington used to live just up the hill. They loved the location and views over Te Moana-o-Raukawa Cook Strait, but they didn’t need so much space, so they moved a few metres down the drive. “Most people would have looked at the site and thought it was the dodgy part of the driveway to park your car on,” says architect Caro Robertson, of Spacecraft Architects. “I don’t think many people would’ve thought, ‘Yes, house site.’” But Spacecraft has a knack for transforming overlooked land.

The clients were deliberately choosing less with the new home, so the brief was fittingly modest: two bedrooms and a decent view. Initially, Robertson and co-director Tim Gittos presented a two-level design stepping down the hillside with a rooftop deck, and the clients signed it off. But then the designers took stock of the building climate. Materials and labour were skyrocketing, making cost creep all but guaranteed, so they scrapped the first plan in favour of a cleaner, single-level home.

“It’s such an incredible aspect with great access to sun and views, so really it was about creating something quiet that was going to sit up above the bush looking out,” says Gittos. The home juts out of the hillside in almost-black (unusual for a Spacecraft build), which settles it comfortably against the bush. Inside, 70 square metres stretch to accommodate two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen-living space oriented towards the deck and view.

Spacecraft are masters of standard materials, and here, dark steel cladding and clear corrugate form the bulk of the exterior, with practical timber decking and flexible fibre-cement around the windows. “It had to be zero maintenance,” says Gittos. “The scaffolding was about four metres high on the downhill side when we were building. You don’t want that going up and down every few years.”

Inside, considerately proportioned spaces make a 2.7-metre stud height feel generous, with economical timber roof trusses concealed above. There are cork floors, macrocarpa window reveals, plasterboard and a dark formply kitchen that runs along one wall. Where you might expect a splashback, there’s a shallow shelf tucked behind sliding timber doors. Just one jam jar deep, it puts all cooking essentials within easy reach. While savings were made elsewhere, the glazing budget held firm. “We tend to tell everyone that the biggest bill is going to be the windows,” says Gittos. When the whole house is organised around those openings, it’s money well spent.

That thinking extended to the outdoor bath. In a window-rich home on a shared driveway, its placement was crucial. Tucked around the corner of the deck and shielded by a frosted screen, it’s private without sacrificing views or light. Weather hammers the hillside, so Robertson and Gittos made sure every external door was protected from a direct hit. The bath’s screening morphs into windows halfway along the deck to guard against the nor’wester. At the entrance, a corrugate-sheltered boardwalk runs the length of the back wall as a buffer between driveway and home.

The reworked single-storey layout made way for one of the design’s best features, the affectionately named “sloppy space”. The home sits on timber piles that travel up through a lower level. Rather than leave this space unused, Spacecraft wrapped it in clear corrugated polycarbonate (a bendier cousin of the sheets upstairs), turning it into one of the home’s hardest-working zones – a space for washing, pottery, bikes, storage, tinkering. A laundry chute hidden in the primary bedroom wardrobe feeds washing directly down here. “People always present architecture in its cleanest form,” says Gittos, “but no one lives like that.”