“This genre-defining alteration of a 1904 villa knits together new and old with a contextual approach that seeks to create a quality piece of urban design as much as it does a home. Flexible spaces will allow its occupants to change how they live over time. Impeccable detailing combines with craft to elevate a small home to something extraordinary.” — Te Rōpū
“The special thing about Berhampore is that it’s the last suburb in Wellington before you get to the town belt,” says architect Mark Leong, who lives in the early 20th-century neighbourhood with his wife, ceramicist Lucy Coote, and their children, in a house they worked on together. “It’s the last bit of central Wellington, so it’s at the edge of something – even though you’re close to everything.”
Leong and Coote bought one of five brick villas back in 2019: they’d just returned home from an extended period living in Sydney, with twin toddler daughters in tow. The story goes that the houses, known as the Five Sisters, were built by a local brickmaker for his daughters. Remarkably, from the front, they appear largely intact. Some are painted brick, some have been rendered, but each has a pretty façade with two identical windows, and a front door positioned around the side rather than front and centre.
The couple’s place had lovely bones, but it was small, with two bedrooms and compartmentalised spaces. There was no flow to the small courtyard garden, but the house had generous proportions and – crucially for Coote – it had a little collection of brick outbuildings that she could adapt as a home studio. More than that, there was something in it that spoke to their shared history in Sydney – the long narrow section, the beigey brickness of it – and it seemed to offer a platform for them creatively. The house would eventually become a meeting of their two practices, a piece of architecture finished with craft – a sleek piece of design with the edges rubbed off, just enough.
Though that was all ahead of them. On an early visit, Leong started to see how the house could work, and he developed a scheme that responded to that idea of being on the edge of the city. His approach was to create a perimeter wall that pushed out to three boundaries, wrapping the house around a sheltered courtyard, and creating a solid bookend for the Five Sisters – and for Berhampore itself, a full stop at the end of the suburb at the end of the city.
His approach was subtle and highly contextual. He looked to the neighbours to establish the layout and material palette, ensuring the house would feel embedded in its surroundings. The house is really a tiny piece of urban design: three boxes, each relating to different neighbours, and each legible as a distinct building. You can see Leong’s background designing apartments in Australia. “Building on the boundary, on a site like this, means you have to be super accurate,” he says. “Everything was microscopically calculated to get the most out of it.”
That’s the architecture. Together, Leong and Coote made it into something better: a glorious intersection between rigour and craft, if that makes any sense. The plan is disciplined; the forms are organic; earthy, clay-like colours combine with brighter hues. You can see Coote’s ceramicist eye in the details.
The original 1904 house sits on the south-western corner and from the front, it looks largely untouched. Working with Perry Barber Carpentry and foreman Kua Palakua, the couple demolished the various outbuildings and reconstructed the original house from the inside out, turning a living room into a third bedroom and rebuilding a bathroom and laundry in largely the same spot, introducing a new living room where the dining area had been. They kept as many heritage features as possible, including original doors and some trim. Original timber windows were carefully double-glazed and then Coote painted the rooms in cheerful shades of green and yellow, monochrome schemes that honour the villa’s heritage but bring a modern feel.
When they discovered the original floors were shot and the foundations were too close to the ground, they opted to pour a new concrete slab throughout. This gave them something to tie the place together – they strapped and lined the walls, and reinforced the structure in the roof. (This wasn’t a pretty process: watching the build from afar via their respective Instagram feeds, it felt like the house was in a state of demolition for an awfully long time.)
For the extension, Leong conceived a subtle building, stepping down the slope in two parts. If you stand across the road from the house and look back at it, you can see the thinking: the extension is clad in pale brick with a flat roof set to the level of the soffit on the original house. There’s a deliberate waist between the two, with a notch that steps into a mirror-glass window, which passers-by are known to check their make-up in.
The brick box sits on a base plastered with a roughcast render – a nod to the original front wall – which then wraps around a third box, Coote’s studio. The studio helps the project turn the corner, building a relationship with the bungalows and garages on this side of the street which were built later – and are more prosaic – than the Five Sisters. “I thought a lot about street character and urban morphology, and how it sits there,” says Leong. “I think it’s because I spent so long working on terrace houses in Sydney – there’s definitely something of that mindset.”
You come inside, through the front door, passing three bedrooms before coming into a living space with a built-in sofa and dining table designed by Leong and Coote. Here, there’s a celebration of painted details and integrated furniture, not to mention recycled timber for softness. (The stairs came from a piece of rimu Leong’s parents had had for years.) “We loved the old house,” says Coote, who worked on it for close to a year after the builders left to complete it. “It had beautiful character and the feel of it is the same – it’s just lighter and fresher.” A beat. “And more solid.”
A few steps down and you’re in the kitchen: white and timber, clean and spare, enlivened with handmade timber knobs by Emile Drescher; the window surrounds here are timber instead of painted wood. Sliding doors open the space right up to a courtyard with a design by James Walkinshaw, of Xanthe White Design. The hob and sink are on the back wall and above that there’s a wide window with a view to the town belt. There are no high cupboards or rangehood to clutter the outlook – instead, a downdraft extracts to the street, giving passers-by an occasional whiff of dinner. Beyond this is a room that is currently a den but will one day be a main bedroom with its own bathroom.
From here, you step outside, where a galvanised steel staircase leads up to the roof deck and concrete stairs lead down to the studio. Walls of glass blocks illuminate the studio with a subtle glow. They’re lovely, and they’re novel – last seen in about 1989 – but they were also the cheapest way of fire-rating the windows in this space. Because the last remarkable thing about this house is that it was built on something of a shoestring. The glass blocks were brought in from Australia, along with tiles for the bathroom; outside, the galvanised steel railings were deliberately left raw, which is particularly effective against the brick. Cabinetry throughout was built by Coote’s dad in Masterton. “We worked every angle and haggled everything,” says Coote. “We hustled so hard because we couldn’t afford it otherwise.”
And now, the house enters into a new phase, as the focus for their family life together: they both say they’re never leaving. The house’s various ledges, picture rails and window sills are a platform for them as a family, adding further layers to the house. It is, as Leong puts it, “the stage for a lifetime of homemaking, decoration and personal expression.”
