The clients – an artist and a textile designer – looked at close to a hundred houses over almost a year before they landed on this one. “It’s hard to quantify,” says one of what finally sold them. “I think it’s just the light, the view, and the proportions of the spaces.”
The site is elevated, looking across the subtle hills of Grey Lynn, Tāmaki Makaurau towards the city. The house is a modest 1910s transitional villa with high ceilings and a “cool little sunroom”. After years in New York, the couple wanted to stay close to the action without being in the thick of it. Grey Lynn felt like “a nexus point, but also relatively chill”. Neither of them lived in the house before they renovated. They bought it, rented it out for well over a year while planning with Pac Studio, and moved straight from render to reality once construction finished.
That blank slate informed the whole design brief. “The house became so personalised to them,” says Liz Tjahjana, a principal architect at Pac. “It incorporated a lot of who they are as people, but also the journeys they’ve lived through previously.” Early on, the team ran colour workshops built around objects the couple had collected while living overseas — a red pendant, a blue teapot, a yellow lemon — until colour itself became, in the architect’s words, “a language expressing the thresholds of different spaces, moving between old and new”.
Early in the process, working from his own sketches, the artist picked up on the idea of the arch of the original verandah running its rhythm along the side of the new extension. The couple arrived at a meeting with Pac to find they’d sketched almost the same idea. “That, to me, is such a great little move without it being over-designed,” he says. “It has integrity.” Neither of them wanted pastiche. The material palette that followed — Strandboard, institutional greens — reads as a deliberate riff on 1970s university design, “like my art school in Christchurch”, he says.
The clients were, by Pac director Aaron Paterson’s account, unusually good collaborators. “The feedback was never: ‘We don’t like this,’” he says. “It was: ‘Have you considered this? Can you interrogate this further?’” The artist describes the relationship in almost identical terms from the other side: “Every time we met with them or came on site, it was like Christmas.”
What drew them to Pac, over the other architects they interviewed, was enthusiasm rather than ego. “They could [have been]egotistical assholes because of their success,” says one, “but they’re just really into it — nerdy about it, in the best way.” They credit the studio’s working relationship with their builder, New Wave, for removing risk from the process entirely. “It was all about, okay, what can we do together — and if we can’t do one thing, what else can we do?”
The corner site led much of the early architectural thinking. The original villa sat, as villas often do, “a million miles off the ground with no connection to the landscape”. Rather than raise the whole building, Pac kept the existing floor level untouched and split a two-storey extension either side of it. With a primary bedroom above and an art studio below, neither half reads as looming over the original house. The owners had initially imagined a separate studio building down the back of the section, but Pac’s split-level alternative, keeping the same gable height as the existing roof, won them over immediately. The studio itself is deliberately unprecious. “It’s not like we want to hang art up on the wall and have exhibitions,” says one. “It’s really for us to go down and get shit done.” He uses it most days as the design headquarters for his practice, and keeps a separate, messier studio in Henderson for actually making things.
Much of what makes the house feel effortless is, on inspection, engineered illusion. Pac rebuilt a verandah to look as though it had always wrapped the building, and shaped a new roof to look like the old one, freeing up ceiling volume without changing the exterior silhouette. A 1980s addition was demolished, but the space it held was kept, tucked back under a reconstructed roofline. “We want you to look at the house and think they haven’t done much to it,” says Paterson, “but we’ve done a lot that’s new, while keeping the existing fabric.”
The house’s dominant red has two separate, overlapping origins. For the textile designer, it traces back to childhood and rural New Zealand’s weathered, hay-barn corrugated iron. For the artist, working through some 30-40 colour iterations with Pac, it was about something else: an earthiness. “Papatūānuku, the volcanic nature of being in Tāmaki.” It’s a colour that belongs equally to farmhouses and sheds as to a more traditional palette drawn from te ao Māori. They point to wharenui, where red carries its own significance, historically linked to ancestors and the spirit world.
A year into living there, what’s struck the couple is not so much the bigger design choices but the smaller, sometimes unexpected details: the way morning light bounces off parked cars and throws shifting shadows through a small round window onto the kitchen ceiling; the lattice pattern the front lights cast across the path at night; watching Xanthe White’s garden planting fill in over the year.
One very deliberate detail is the fabric-covered wall in the dining room. Made by the textile designer client, the fabric abstractly echoes the vertical and horizontal rhythm of the street-facing screen outside. Much of the material and colour language throughout the house traces back to apartments the couple occupied in New York: a riff on a 70s wallpaper from Brooklyn, a kelly green wall from their first place together on 36th Street. “This place is a culmination of little things we’ve had,” says the artist — carried across the ocean and a decade, and into a house on a little hill in Grey Lynn.
