In this clever 1930s bungalow renovation, the dysfunctional floor plan is remade into a programme that finally opens up from front to back.
In association with First Windows & Doors.
In a neighbourhood of timber villas, bungalows and old trees, there was a white stucco house with the charm of a fairytale illustration and a floor plan that had lost the plot. Kate Rogan and Eva Nash of Rogan Nash Architects, both based in Westmere, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, had walked past it before there was ever a commission. “Chocolate box,” is how Eva describes it. Pretty as a picture, with curved archways and a front elevation that still held its character. Behind it, the layout was less kind.
A young family had bought the house for those qualities — the community, the character. With Rogan Nash Architects, they began to write its next chapter. Out went a 1990s renovation that placed a bathroom in the centre of the floor plan, severed the hallway and left the rear dark and cut off from the dropped-down garden.
“We like to imagine what a house wants to grow up to be,” says Kate. For this 1930s bungalow, growing up meant keeping the charm of the street frontage, then extending the roofline into a new living pavilion that steps down the site. Rogan Nash likened the experience to a pop-up book: views opening between spaces and the rear of the house expanding into light, height and garden connection.
Reinstating the hallway was the first move. Rogan Nash stripped out the intrusive bathroom, brought back a gallery corridor through the centre of the plan and positioned bedrooms and bathrooms off it. The front rooms, including the main bedroom with its original leadlight window, were returned to close to their original configuration. Existing floorboards and panelled interior doors were retained throughout. Skylights were cut into the hallway and kitchen ceiling to pull morning light deep into living spaces.
Restoring the corridor as a passageway created the compression that makes everything beyond it feel like release.
That release is deliberate and precise. A step down into the kitchen and dining room, another into the living space, and the ceiling rises with the new, extended roofline. Kate references Frank Lloyd Wright’s thinking on how small shifts in floor level can alter spatial awareness dramatically.
ThermalHeart aluminium joinery from First Windows & Doors runs full height at the rear. “The dark joinery with those crisp handles felt like the words on the page,” says Kate. “It punctuates the space.” Sliders open at the corner to connect the living room to the deck. All joinery is fitted with locally made AGP double glazing, and each opening window contributes to cross ventilation, so the house doesn’t rely on artificial cooling.
A generous eave and Solux-E low-e glazing protects against overheating, keeping the kitchen, dining and living spaces liveable through orientation rather than technology.
This is also where the house steps into its contemporary self. While character timber joinery in the front rooms is retained, aluminium takes over at the rear. Rogan Nash treat this as a threshold rather than a problem to resolve. “We think it’s really important that one can tell, okay, now I’ve moved into the new part of the home,” says Kate. The rear elevation makes the most of that freedom
with vertical timber battens layering over the façade like pages. It works as both privacy screen and sun shading — the roofline and proportion formally echoing the front, but in a different register. From the bottom of the section, looking back up the garden, it has its own presence.
The colour palette carries that sense of movement through the interior, shifting in sorbet tones as the rooms change mood. Caramels warm the front lounge, pale greens move through the kitchen and living areas, mint and blue soften the bathrooms, and blush pink brings a lift to the laundry.
Kate and Eva had been testing those combinations for months, collecting materials long before cabinetry was resolved. When the owners moved in and hung their own artworks, colours chosen independently matched the walls and joinery. “You just feel like it really is their house,” says Eva.
For the family living there now, that shift is felt in small, daily ways. “If you wake up every day and you’re in a space that delights you, you find joy,” says Eva. “There’s a quiet time to just be, to have that together-alone moment or to enjoy small daily rituals.”
On warm afternoons, those rituals move outside. The corner sliders peel back and life spills onto the deck, where the timber screening keeps the neighbours at a distance, without shutting out the reserve beyond.
The tōtara at the edge of Lemington Reserve is visible from the rear steps, where the kids tend to settle after school, or from the pool at the bottom of the garden. The backyard that once sat remote from the house above it now belongs to the everyday life of the home.
firstwindows.co.nz
Words Alice Lines
Photography Simon Wilson