The French architects Lacaton and Vassal, winners of the 2021 Pritzker Prize, have spent their careers advocating for adaptive reuse by transforming and reusing existing structures. “Demolishing is a decision of easiness and short-term,” Anne Lacaton once told the Guardian. “It is a waste of many things – a waste of energy, a waste of material and a waste of history. Moreover, it has a very negative social impact. For us, it is an act of violence.”
New-builds aside, many renovations – while technically alterations or additions – could be described as acts of violence. More challenging is a scheme that carefully picks its way through what might be kept, as with the home of Tony Calder, a director at regenerative design practice ahha. “We tried to stick with existing structural lines and keep a wee bit of the story,” he says.
Calder and partner Julia Smith bought the house in Belleknowes, Ōtepoti Dunedin, back in 2018, sight unseen, while they were living in Amsterdam. The original place was a 100-year-old villa, high on a hill in a quiet area not far from the city centre, with a bowling green at the end of the street. As it turns out, the house has lovely views down the Kaikorai Valley to Brighton and Green Island, and spectacular weather comes in from the coast and rolls up the valley, which Calder likes almost as much as the view itself. However, these qualities were as yet undiscovered. The original house had little relationship with the garden, the light, or even the views. “We didn’t realise we had these beautiful views until much later,” he says, “so we wanted to open it up and experience that wider context.”
Calder is also a carpenter, so he set out to renovate the house himself, with occasional help from his father and friends. “It kept getting bigger and bigger,” he says, laughing. Eventually, the couple moved out for eight months while Calder got the house back into a liveable state. “It was three projects in one – unpicking the old house, restoring the villa and building all the new stuff.”
The pretty double-bay villa was largely original in the front, with various ad-hoc additions in the back, a boxy layout, a tiny kitchen that blocked the end of the hall, and a bathroom on the northwest corner of the house. In the living room, an aluminium window seat was positioned high above a walled courtyard – to get there, you had to walk back up the hallway, out the front door and down the side of the house. Downstairs was dark and damp, with a laundry at the bottom of a very steep flight of stairs. And, not surprisingly, it was cold – a shock for the couple coming from Amsterdam where the winters are colder, but the houses are more comfortable.
Calder’s plan was simple: leave as many structural walls in place as possible, preserve the character and charm of the original, but drastically reorganise the back of the house and upgrade its thermal performance. To achieve that, his design removed various dated and failing interventions, propped up the roof and floor, and excavated underneath to improve the foundations and create a proper basement. Beyond the original footprint, he added one small room with big square windows to capture the weather and views, and a deck.
Upstairs, he lightly reworked the plan. Front bedrooms remained, a living room became a third bedroom, and a bedroom became a bathroom. The living space now runs across the back of the house with a flight of stairs tucked into one corner. Here, spaces are lightly offset, giving them a sense of separation, with the new living room extending out into a new volume. Downstairs is a flexible space with a laundry and bathroom that could function as a work-from-home studio, main bedroom or even a self-contained flat. “We didn’t personally need that much space,” he says. The couple had moved back to Dunedin so Smith could specialise as an orthodontist; they weren’t totally sure if they’d be living there after she graduated. “So, we were trying to make it suitable for more than just us.”
The extension is consciously different, clad in macrocarpa which will slowly darken and weather, with double-glazed black aluminium joinery. The back wall is curved, creating a pop-out on the western side that captures views while screening out the neighbours. The cantilever projects out over the existing brick wall, which meant putting the beam on top of the bearers rather than underneath. Over the top, Calder added some lovely built-in seating in the living area. Now it provides a windbreak for a fern garden on the lower level. “It just seemed really nice to keep it there to talk to how the house used to be,” he says. “I wanted to try and integrate it into the architecture, so you have this old and new wrapping around each other.”
But it’s not an alien box dropped on the back; as part of that thoughtful unpicking, Calder was careful to ensure you could read the layers of history in the house. “We looked at moments of the villa – the ornate entry, which is full of curves and detail, for instance. We wanted something ornate but minimal.” The original ceiling heights carry down the hall and into the kitchen, before dropping slightly over the living area. Here, a curved bulkhead manages the transition from one space to the other – a recurring motif. “The curves help with softening things,” he says. “The big curve on the back wall draws you into the view, and others help with not having harsh transitions into spaces.”
That’s the pretty stuff. What you can’t see is the enormous amount of work that went into making the house warm and dry. Calder increased the energy efficiency of the villa by more than 200 percent through a considered thermal strategy. “We’ve stuffed insulation in wherever we could,” he says. They also made it almost air-sealed to reduce heat loss in Dunedin’s cold winters. Where possible, the walls are double thickness – close to 300mm in places – and they restored all the original timber sash windows, adding double glazing. A Pyroclassic wood burner in the living area is almost unnecessary but ensures everything is warm throughout winter.
The couple only got to enjoy the house for a couple of months before they moved to Wānaka for Smith’s work – it’s rented out now, and presumably the tenants get to enjoy its warmth and views. Regardless, this old building made new offers some important lessons in carefully upgrading housing stock. Lacaton and Vassal would no doubt approve.
1. Entrance
2. Bedroom
3. Bathroom
4. Kitchen
5. Dining
6. Living
7. Terrace
8. Studio
9. Laundry
10. Meeting
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