“This was the opportunity for us and others to build a family home,” says architect Helle Westergaard of the co-housing development in Grey Lynn, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland that she, husband Thom Gill and another couple kick-started back in 2018. “Which some people find completely tortuous – we ended up building 20.”

Gill was born in Aotearoa and Westergaard is Danish: they met in London and then moved to Copenhagen, where their three children were born and where they lived in an airy rented apartment in the centre of the city. Returning to Tāmaki Makaurau in 2012, they bought a house and settled into life in a pleasant inner-city suburb, but still had a hankering to build their own home. “As architects, the conventional way of building yourselves a house would be to buy a piece of land and build the dream place,” says Gill. “But we spent a long time living in Europe, where that is not the norm at all.”

Instead, over years, they assembled a group who felt the same way about building a community of like-minded people, committed to living close together around a shared garden, making decisions collaboratively and sharing assets, including cars and laundry facilities, and the accoutrements of suburban life: pizza oven, barbecue, outdoor furniture. The oldest were retirees; the youngest were buying their first home.

None of them had large amounts of capital, but none of them felt like moving to cheaper far-flung suburbs, and existing medium-density housing with its lack of outdoor space didn’t fit the bill. Now, after five years of working together, the group’s idea of what constitutes home extends past their own four walls. “The process of getting the group together was running into people who felt the same way,” says Gill, “and who had time, energy, skills and wish to help create a community that could provide all the benefits that standalone housing couldn’t provide.”

They wanted to be based in central Auckland, close to the city, public transport and bike paths. More than anything, the idea of a shared central garden was key to the whole enterprise: while they might all end up living in modestly scaled spaces, they would have a large green lung to look out on, spend time in and, critically, grow food in. “From the start, we agreed as a total principle that we wouldn’t have any fences in the common areas,” says Gill. “We wanted the undivided, full expanse of a shared area that we could all enjoy.” 

The finished buildings take up an oddly shaped block between two streets on Surrey Crescent in Grey Lynn. The side streets are quiet and leafy. Surrey Crescent is busy, not quite arterial: Grey Lynn School is over the road. From the road, you get the sense of plastered brick and a domestic scale – a series of front doors giving onto concrete-block stairways. It’s somehow Scandinavian in its low-key approach. 

From the start, the idea behind the Cohaus was to make decisions collaboratively: weekly meetings were common for a long time, as the group secured financing and set up a holding company that would act as developer. (Each household owned shares via a trust.) And as a group, they endured some of the frustrations and costs, writ large, that all house-builders endure. Costs escalated by 20 percent between the initial quantity survey and putting the plans out for tender; they worked to “value manage” the project but ultimately they all ended up putting in more money. Some families dropped out; others came in. 

Writer Leonie Kapea Hayden and partner Harry Cundy came in at that point, taking over another couple’s trust. “It was quite a high-emotion meeting,” she says of their first discussion. “And I just liked that in a high-stress environment, everyone was still communicating excellently and being honest about what was challenging – you were allowed to be who you are in that space.”

For Hayden, who had previously lived in housing owned by Ngāti Whātua across town in Ōrakei, the appeal was of something approaching a papakāinga. There are babies in the place, and 80-somethings; the older kids look after the younger ones and word goes around when someone is sick. “I feel so safe that I could fall down in my apartment and pass out, and someone would find me,” she says. “There’s always someone to help out, which I love.”

Westergaard and Gill’s design, as noted, is humble in materials and approach. It’s also subtle, and clever. The buildings sit on a crank in Surrey Crescent, with the two side streets fanning out, and occupies three former sections with a gentle slope away from the street. There are single-level 19th-century houses on both sides. The site also had a character villa on it which they were keen to preserve.  

Developers would have demolished the villa, ignored the wonks, and built straight lines, with parking in the middle and maybe one or two access points. Studio Nord did the opposite, moving the villa to a corner and pushing the new buildings as far to the edges of the site as they were allowed, following the contour and shape of the land. They created pathways and multiple entry points around the site: it’s porous, village-like, with no swipe-card access.

At the front, buffering the garden from the street, there’s a three-storey block clad in white-painted brick with a series of big front doors that lead onto concrete and timber stairwells – two apartments per floor share a landing. It’s intimate, human-scaled: each apartment has a different-coloured front door and the landings have been taken over by everything from prams to plants and places to store shoes. To the rear, a three-story steel verandah provides generous outdoor space to each apartment. Behind it, running down one side of the garden, there’s a two-storey, timber-framed terrace block, again with a bend about halfway along. 

There are nine onsite carparks, tucked into a corner of the site off one of the side streets, including six car stackers for the electric or hybrid cars shared between the group. While owners don’t have to give up their private vehicle, they’re encouraged to – a move that was particularly contentious with Auckland Council and led to the architects developing a traffic plan for the project (a first for an apartment development in the city).

There are few identical units – apartments and terrace houses are defined by the unusual shape. “All the plans were negotiated and worked out by everyone,” says Westergaard. “It was very late in the process that we actually assigned which apartment was for whom.” The first families moved into the Cohaus just before the first lockdowns of 2020 and at that point, the shared space was bare. Unlike a development, there were things to resolve and work through as a group. “We aimed to get things 90 percent finished, then work things out on the ground,” says Westergaard. (The capacious bike garage, for instance, is still something of a work in progress.)

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