Sinclair O’Connor was a Fremantle-born architect who designed a number of iconic apartment buildings around central Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in the early 20th century, including Brooklyn. Conceived towards the end of the 1920s and completed in 1936, it was designed in a neo-Georgian style, with art deco flourishes and elegant sash windows. His apartments, many of them now a century old, are still very much the last word in apartment living in the CBD.
Architect Ben Lloyd, of Lloyd Hartley Architects, and his wife Phoebe Gibbons bought this two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of Brooklyn in 2014. It runs east to west and has views from the west-facing living room taking in city towers and a reserve filled with established pōhutukawa and ginkgo: lovely by day and magical at night.
The building has a sense of graceful, unchanging solidity, and apartments are generously sized – this one is 68 square metres with two bedrooms. It was charming but lacked modern comforts. These homes were designed in an era where kitchens were minimal and storage was seen as a luxury.
The building is a listed category 2 historic place, so any improvements had to be sensitively done, and largely invisible. Lloyd’s redesign for the apartment involved completely gutting it, with builders removing period timber mouldings and picture rails, adding channels for wiring and ultra-fast broadband behind the skirting boards, before carefully putting it back together.
His one major move was gaining permission to close over a door to the kitchen, opening the space up to the living room and creating a better flow. The revised space feels effortless and elegant, with a run of classic white cabinetry and period-appropriate detail including brass toe-kicks and a French oak parquet floor.
A classic space, with a beautiful update and now for sale with Liz Derbyshire from Barfoot & Thompson.
Brooklyn
61/66-70 Emily Place
Britomart
Auckland Central
