No one could accuse architect Craig Burt of being impatient. He and wife Ang Hall bought the site on which they now live back in 2002. An easy walk from the centre of Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, the Wadestown property was north-facing and had fantastic views from the top of the section out to the harbour and back over the bush. It had an original transitional villa on the front of the site but, critically, it also had room to build up the back. “At the time, I was working for Gerald [Parsonson] and we were doing lots of subdivisions where we built a new house for clients on the back of their existing site,” says Burt, now a director with Gerald at Parsonson Architects. “It was a bit of a no-brainer, really.”
Burt and Hall fixed up the villa and got it liveable before decamping overseas, leaving it tenanted while they were away. Eventually, they returned to Wellington and, by 2012, decided it was time to do something with the place. They moved back into the old house, quickly realising it was much worse off than they thought, which led to a fairly major renovation. “That gave me the opportunity to look at the whole section with fresh eyes,” Burt says. “And to ask how we might want to live on that site with another house on it.”
From the get-go, he was keen to increase density on the section, and to create a sense of community that allowed for privacy in each house but encouraged friendly neighbourhood relations; those casual bump-ins and accidental connections that, when done right, make you feel at home. Initially, he obtained resource consent for an extra two buildings: one on the front above a garage (there’s no off-street parking on this steep site); and another up the back. Connecting all of them would be a new path up the western side of the site. Privacy would come from the vertical separation between the houses, and careful placement of rooms and courtyards.
All that achieved, he set about designing the uppermost house. The top of the site had three enormous macrocarpa trees that the family used to sit under, and where Burt would go to think about what form the house should take. “I liked the idea of sitting under the mass of those trees and the framed shafts through them,” he says. “I was pretty adamant that I wanted it to recede, much like the trees did, so we ended up using the trees as a metaphor for the massing of it.”
Houses on hills seem to do one of two things: stick up uncomfortably or dig in unnecessarily. This one does neither. Instead, Burt came up with a three-storeyed form: a series of interconnecting boxes that follow the gradient of the hill and resemble Tetris-like shapes with cutaways and erosions to allow views and light into every room. “It was just about stepping and staggering them,” he says. “From some angles it looks like it’s dug into the site. It is a little bit, but not hugely.” The lower floor contains kitchen, dining and living spaces, running east to west, with wide windows to take in sweeping views of the harbour and bush.
Upstairs runs perpendicular to that and back into the hill, containing three bedrooms, a couple of bathrooms and a laundry. Perched on top is a third level: a small study reached by a ladder. “It just felt like the house needed something to bookend it,” says Burt, “rather than dying into the hillside. I wanted something to hold it and add to the mass of the forms stepping up the hill.” Functionally, it also gave him somewhere to work from home.
Burt worried initially about the entry. At the top of the concrete steps, which wind their way up from the street, there’s a sheltered west-facing courtyard off the music/living room with a built-in fireplace. The family spends a lot of time here in summer, lighting the fire as the sun fades. But it’s also where visitors naturally arrive, despite the front door proper being a couple of steps up. Eventually he embraced that implied entry further down the slope. “So it could be a lot more casual,” he says. “It’s a family home, where we live in quite a casual way. So the spaces were always going to be quite casual, too.”
As you come through the formal entry, you’re held for a moment before moving into the living spaces a couple of steps down, the view opening out in front of you. The kitchen is one long bench down the southern side and finishes in a built-in seat with a small table. There’s a living space here, and a dining table, as well as a music/living room behind a fin wall largely defined by cabinetry. There’s little definition between the spaces, helped by the lack of an island – the various spaces bleed into each other, opening up to long views out to the harbour. Upstairs, the views are more contained; the windows are smaller and more carefully placed for particular moments. In the main bedroom, a long slot window opens up the view of the water from the bed, while obscuring the Interislander ferry terminal.
Throughout, there’s very little in the way of white plasterboard. Instead, the interior is enriched with timber linings, concrete and green carpet. “We wanted the spaces to be warm and not clinical. Often when you’re throwing lots of light around, they can become quite sterile, unless you use those darker colours and lots of timber,” Burt says. And in all of this, you see his patience kicking in again. While the family moved in as soon as was practical, many final touches took a few years to work through – small details, including a painted piece of cabinetry in the music/living room that houses everything from magazines to records. Not long after moving in, Burt painted the white wall in between the living spaces black, because white felt too jarring. “That’s where we go to hunker down,” he says. “If there’s a storm blowing, it’s really nice and protected.”
Not that you feel it much in this house. It’s close to Passivehaus standards in its approach, with high levels of insulation, a sealed building envelope, thermally improved joinery and a heat-recovery system that brings in fresh air. Solar panels on the roof provide much of the home’s power. There is central heating, but it’s used minimally – wood-burning happens in the courtyard. In summer, the family eats outside almost every night. When we chat, it’s mid-March and they’ve been up on the top terrace almost every evening.
Not long after finishing the house, Burt and Hall got to know their neighbours, a couple with kids, and the architect proceeded to design an alteration for them (which featured in issue 19 of Here). Meanwhile, the villa in front is now tenanted by friendly folks who also have kids. Burt delights in bumping into his neighbours on his commute to and from work. As time has passed, the boundaries between the three properties have begun to blur – the Burt-Hall family bikes are in the neighbours’ garage, while kids from all three families use the trampoline that sits between their houses (technically it’s Burt and Hall’s property, but it’s kind of neutral ground). The other day, Burt was over helping his neighbour paint a new cabin they’ve designed, while one of the front tenants was inside having a wine with their other neighbour. “So it’s become a real community,” says Burt, “which is really cool.”
1. Cable Car
2. Patio
3. Entry
4. Music/Living
5. Dining
6. Family
7. Kitchen
8. Workshop
9. Bedroom
10. Ensuite
11. Walk-in
12. Bathroom
13. Storage
14. Sewing
15. Garden
16. Shed
17. Laundry
18. Study
