This Wellington townhouse renovation proves what colour, warmth and genuine creative trust can do when a couple decide to go all in.
Deep green carpet, chocolate timber, golden light pouring in. From the third storey, the bush on the hills beyond Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington fills the window. Two more floors sit below, bolder and livelier (and pinker) the further down you go. The owners told interior designer Natalie Bradburn early on that they wanted this room to feel like a treehouse. Up here, it does.
Anaesthetists Jenny Ross and Sam Schriek met in Te Matau-a- Māui/Hawke’s Bay during a training rotation. Jenny had come from Edinburgh; Sam had been in Wellington since university. The city had taken hold of both of them — bush reachable within minutes, the ability to walk almost everywhere and the biggest concentration of their closest friends. “It’s the kind of place where you go to the local café enough times that the staff know your order,” says Jenny. “Where the people at Moore Wilson’s were so excited when our baby arrived.”
When the opportunity came to buy into Paddington, a mixed-density development in the heart of Wellington, the market was brutal and the decision was partly pragmatic. Their upstairs neighbour mentioned the townhouse; Sam’s mother made the case for it. They signed, rented the place out and went overseas for a period. When they came back to Wellington they knew it was where they wanted to settle. The neighbourhood already felt like theirs. The house just needed to feel like it belonged to them too.
Natalie had recently established her studio after years working in architecture and a bathroom-focused practice, Clean, Clean, Clean, that had built a following. Jenny had encountered her work before she knew whose it was. A piece she’d spotted at Frances Nation in Ōtautahi/Christchurch turned out to be Natalie’s. The couple handed over creative control early and trusted the process completely. “We were paying Natalie to do what she does,” says Sam. “The least we could do was let her do it.”
Natalie collaborated on design, material decisions and procurement with local creative Lucy Coote, a friend whose instincts and resources proved a natural fit for the project. Jenny and Sam brought reference points, including hours spent at Customs, their favourite café, drawn to its warm timber and low light. At home they wanted the ground floor to be cool and playful. Upstairs, their idea for the main bedroom was a calm, intimate treehouse. “It was a fun brief to explore,” says Natalie.
“The whimsy of a treehouse meets the mood and mystery of a late-night wine bar.” On the ground floor, the key planning move saw a toilet and study cupboard removed and absorbed into the living area. A cramped sequence of separate functions transformed into a single room. A nook with a built-in sofa became a library corner of sorts, books and records within reach, low light, warm and unhurried. The kitchen cabinetry was entirely stripped and replaced. Sam is tall, so the bench height went up to a metre, a practical decision that turned out to be the thing he talks about most. “His whole life, he’d been dealing with 900mm benchtops,” says Natalie. “He walked in and was like: this alone was worth it.” With the stairwell taking up a third of the floorplan, the vertical journey mattered as much as any individual room. A custom green carpet threads the levels together, running from bottom to top as the palette shifts and deepens on the way up.
Colour arrived with their first proposal, and the question: how do you feel about a pink kitchen? Jenny’s answer was immediately yes. Neither had thought of themselves as people who lived with colour — but they have a way of making it feel inevitable rather than brave. The green and pink were locked in first; the rest of the palette built outward from there, the base paint shifting from stark white to a half-strength creamy neutral with a green undertone. Every other townhouse in the development had been delivered the same way: white walls, grey carpet, blank. This one shows what happens when someone knows how to read a brief and push it further.
Midway through the project, Jenny found out she was pregnant. The baby and a large Rhodesian Ridgeback named Seamus, who had already joined the household, found their way into material decisions. An ascent through the levels is the central design idea made visible. It’s a tonal progression from bold to calm, public to private. The middle floor embraces lighter, golden warmth with a study/bedroom for the baby and a bathroom updated with a new basin and light fitting. Up again and in the main bedroom, where dark timber joinery meets the green carpet, the space settles into something calm and secluded. The ensuite is the room the team spent longest on. Working in hospitals, Jenny and Sam wanted nothing that felt sterile. Two basins became one, custom designed by Natalie, a wide tiled bath fitted into the dog-leg footprint, and opaque window film was replaced with timber shutters that let the room open or close to the view as the mood strikes.
Mornings now begin in the ensuite, golden-lit, the waking city visible through the shutters. Evenings end on the sofa downstairs, records on, the projector running across the wall like their very own speakeasy. “The house isn’t a financial investment,” says Jenny. “It’s our home. It’s the environment we live in.” Their life in this city was already in place. Now home has caught up.
Words Alice Lines
Photography Simon Wilson
