Having invested in their spatial surrounds, this couple don’t mind if it takes a while to get the decorative aspects just right.
Mums are everyday heroes. When Anna works from home a couple of times a week, she confines herself to a tiny corner of the south-facing TV lounge, so that her three children can each enjoy a bedroom in the wing that gets the most morning sun. But her time will come. As soon as her eldest decamps from his room with its intimate view of the patio garden, this office-in-waiting will be hers.
Anna and her husband Mike experienced a minor miracle when they turned up at the auction for this 1912 bungalow on an elevated site above Narrow Neck Beach. “It was ramshackle, but with beautiful character,” she remembers. They were the only bidders.
Perhaps it was the unusual layout that put people off: an 80s extension — a wing incorporating bedrooms and a double garage — meant driving across the backyard to park the car. The ‘front’ door to the west was seldom used and the main bedroom faced north and blocked all the sun from the living areas.
A jazzy colour scheme — lilac walls with pink gingham curtains in the main suite, road-sign yellow in the extension and a kitchen in brown oak — did nothing to lighten the mood. “When we moved in the kids were three, five and seven years old; it was raining constantly and so dark inside I cried,” says Anna.
Capable and pragmatic, she found her despair was short-lived. Anna turned her focus to the positives: a grandstand position metres from the beach, the high stud, charming colonial-style windows and, most of all, a close-knit community of neighbours.
When architect Sam Atcheson of DAA came to see the project, he zoned in on a layering of function that would extend the living areas, provide easy flow to the garden and give the adults their own upstairs retreat. Say it fast and this renovation/alteration seems simple. Of course, this is a century-old character home so one thing led to another. In all, only two existing internal walls remained in position.
The reimagined 275m2 house still resonates with history, however. The original part, clad in weatherboard, presents as an elegant, simple gable to the street. Cane chairs on the front verandah set the scene for timeless coastal living.
Like any self-respecting beach house, the plan has no formal entry. You walk straight into the living room from the front door. Anna can attest that the wide-plank flooring in this updated open-plan zone is often lightly salted with sand from togs and towels.
Beneath the three-metre stud, where a new ceiling sports battens to tie it back in time, the kitchen is a natural magnet for the family and their visitors. “It’s a bit of a statement against the light-and-airy spaces in the rest of the room,” explains Sam. Full-height dark oak cabinetry is a nod to the original cupboards, a butler’s pantry tucks in behind and an easycare Caesarstone bench is a platform for living. “The kids spend a lot of time sitting around it in their Oodies waiting for me to serve them,” laughs Anna.
From the kitchen and dining, the flow to the outdoor room, sheltered in the L-shaped embrace of the house and with an operable louvre roof, is effortless. This alfresco space enjoys borrowed views of pōhutukawa on the perimeter and, once the alteration was finished, the family couldn’t wait for the first holiday season to roll around so they could share long summer lunches, with platter food and friendship on the menu.
Tracing the topography of the land, the stepped-down bedroom wing runs north-south. Sam flipped the layout here, where the bedrooms previously opened directly to the garden, to insert a glazed corridor that provides visual connection to the outdoors.
It also offers a continuous line of sight from the kitchen through a window to the far end of the garden. This wing, clad in orange-toned reclaimed brick, still speaks the language of heritage but in a different dialect to the weatherboard. “We saw an opportunity to do something different to distinguish it from the existing house,” says Sam.
A light cement render on this spine of bricks lends a gritty textural aspect to the palette, inside and out — “You need to be careful not to nick your woollens on it as you brush past,” says Anna — while aluminium sliders in Scoria red have an historic flavour.
Their oldest son now gets the bedroom with a view of the vege patch and citrus grove, and the two younger children also have their own rooms, so the couple feel justified in enjoying their own eyrie upstairs. “We went with a monopitch roof to keep the height down as we didn’t want to block the neighbours, view,” explains Anna.
Steps to a podium-like stage beneath a window are a reflection of the stairs that lie beneath it. “It’s a change of level that allowed us to make this a much bigger room,” explains Sam. “And a place to read with a view of the neighbourhood.”
From this room, clad in yellow cedar, the couple can look across the sea to the lighthouse at the entrance to the Rangitoto Channel and, in late spring, a maple tree bursts tawny red just beyond the window.
In the family bathroom, Anna chose off-the-shelf pale-grey tiles which run all the way to the high-pitched ceiling, and these are echoed in the tiling of the ensuite. “I love their texture when the light plays across them,” she says.
Having completed the major structural moves, the owners have switched to playing the long game, taking time to make the house their own, planting out the garden in stages and updating furniture as and when they can. In the main living area, a second-hand sofa purchased off a friend fills the generous space, three smoky glass pendants by Luke Jacomb Studio, brought over from their previous house, define the dining zone, and restored vintage dining chairs from Vitrine were a happy buy.
“I don’t care if everything is not pristine and new,” says Anna. “I want to find things that have meaning, to make it feel more personal.”
Meanwhile, they’re making memories that will last for generations. On weekends Anna bakes a loaf or two of sourdough (great with butter and her chunky homemade orange marmalade), Mike makes his famous-in-Devonport choc-chip cookies and the kayaks and rods are dragged down the drive for a spot of paddling and fishing off the rocks.
“Whenever I start to wonder if the cost of the renovation was worth it, I remember there’s a reason people don’t leave Devonport,” says Anna. Late-summer evening as the family return from the beach, kahawai in the chilly bin, the light from the colonial-style porch lantern beckons them home.
Words Claire McCall
Photography Simon Wilson