A stark reality confronts anyone trying to enter the Auckland property market, or, in non-real-estate speak, own somewhere decent to live. Even for the comparatively affluent, the disparity between available means and auction prices is dismaying. Consequently, a lot of mental bandwidth in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland is dedicated to figuring out ways to overcome the barriers to home ownership.

For Ryan Heron, the leg-up into the ‘market’ was provided by friendship and the provisions of the Auckland Unitary Plan. Heron is a filmmaker who, before Covid restrictions re-arranged his life, divided his time between New Zealand and Europe. “That stage of my life might be over,” he says, with the ruefulness appropriate to someone who has spent a good part of the past several years living in an apartment in Barcelona’s historic Barri Gòtic quarter. 

Tired of bunking down with family and friends on his stays back in New Zealand, Heron partnered with a friend to buy a property in Sandringham, the unpretentious, bungalow-rich suburb that spreads south of Eden Park. Heron’s friend, who has a young family, occupied the house on the site, a lot of which has the comfortable proportions of Auckland sections carved up in the early 20th century. The backyard is generous, large enough for a trampoline, with plenty of space to spare. Sufficient, crucially, to accommodate a ‘minor dwelling’, which is permitted in areas of the city, like this part of Sandringham, classified as a Residential Mixed Housing Urban Zone (‘H5’) in the Auckland Plan. 

Planning permission entails meeting various design standards, including those governing a dwelling’s site coverage, its height-to-boundary relationship and its ‘required outlook space’. The potential for a building’s form to be the brute result of the arithmetic of compliance is obviously significant, as is evident on a stroll along any of Auckland’s residential streets. Engaging an architect on a minor dwelling project is not mandatory, but even a cursory analysis of the incidence of the type in the city’s suburbs would suggest it is a good idea.

Once he secured his backyard site in H5-land, Heron found a builder, Ben Kevey-Maiden of New Wave Construction, who in turn recommended an architecture practice, Pac Studio, the Auckland-based firm founded and directed by Aaron Paterson and Sarosh Mulla. Heron did his research – he’s used to creating ‘mood boards’ – and liked Pac Studio’s work, including a number of projects in the Matakana and Point Wells area north of Auckland. 

In 2020, Pac Studio notably demonstrated its readiness to reconcile fun and function with the very cute and much-awarded Point Wells Cricket Club. Before that, Mulla designed the acclaimed, and equally photogenic, Welcome Shelter at the Waikereru Ecosanctuary near Gisborne. There’s much more to this innovative firm than Insta-irresistibility, though. Paterson and Mulla combine practice with their teaching roles as part-time senior lecturers at the University of Auckland’s School of Architecture – Mulla has a doctorate, Paterson is completing one – and they are very active in exhibiting and writing about architecture.