If you remember, this beautiful old villa in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland – which featured in issue 23 of Here back at the start of 2024 – is one of the more spectacular examples of scope creep we’ve seen in the magazine.
The owner – who bought the house with his late wife back in 1981, and raised a family here – initially approached Sarosh Mulla of Pac Studio to help refine some colour choices. The house had always been colourful, but he wanted to rejuvenate it – partly in memory of his wife, with colours inspired by a French railway station that he fell in love with on a trip after she died.
That initial approach led to a major renovation, moving the kitchen from a dark corner of the house, and adding a new extension that celebrated the glorious detail and workmanship of the original 1906 villa. Early on, he told them how good the view was from the roof. “I’d been up here when I was much younger,” he says, sitting in an airy new living room with 360 degree views of Auckland.
“In our initial chats, he told us the roof had a great view and we should think about a belvedere,” recalls Mulla. “We didn’t need much more encouragement than that.” Very early on, he drew it up, turning what had been a dining room and then a bedroom into a library, with a winding staircase up to another level – a room with windows on all sides and a delicate lantern skylight at the top.
After building the kitchen, the owner paused. “I said, ‘No we’re going to stop here,’” he recalls. “And then I changed my mind. Wisely.” A year or so after they finished stage one, James Hosking’s team of craftsmen were back, to revisit the upper rooms – and the roof – without damaging any of their previous work.
Mulla’s design is both comprehensive and sensitive: he converted a former fireplace and chimney breast in the bedroom-turned-library into a lift shaft, and while they took out the ceiling in that room, they left wall linings intact, and carefully set aside timber to reuse elsewhere – including as sarking in the belvedere. “We were just trying to recycle as much of the old house as possible,” he says.
It’s also very romantic, inspired, Mulla insists, by a scene in the classic film My Fair Lady where Professor Higgins dances up a flight of stairs through a library. “Any time you can something lyrical and fun in the passage to a room, it means the room itself will be great fun to be in,” he says. “You’re in this incredible location, so let’s just get up and try and enjoy it.”
It has a similarly brave and joyful palette to the rest of the house – a rich mix of brown and pink and yellow, with touches of native timber, which makes a fitting backdrop for art including a Tibetan tapestry, a painting by the Aboriginal artist Gabrielle Possum and an extraordinary flax work by Gisborne-based Te Ao Marama Ngarimu. There are also rather a lot of books, and custom sofas by Rose & Heather. And that view.
Once you’re there, the room is much bigger than you think it’s going to be, extending across the full width of the roof. In this way, Mulla and the team also solved some thorny issues, including a failing membrane between two hipped roofs that had always leaked. In between the ground floor and the top floor, they also found space for storage and a mechanical plant room. “Doing this also allowed us to resolve the long-term things on the house that were problematic,” he says. “It was an opportunity to fix things up and sort out the house for another hundred years.”
All of which, if I’m honest, sounds suspiciously like a rationalisation for what is obviously a fruitful collaboration between owner and client, exploring colour and celebrating the rich detail of this beautiful old house. “It’s an example of how much fun you can have with architecture and an old house,” says Mulla. “It’s just so magical when you come up here.”
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