One of the hardest things with writing about architecture – or maybe, writing about anything – is there are always a multitude of ways to get into a story, but when you tell that story you tell it at the expense of other things.

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You can right the balance, of course, and you can add sidebars and asides and maybe a bracket here and there for a bit of extra information, but the slant you take tends to nudge everything else out. Add too much, and it’s like a soup with too much in it; things get confused, the reader loses the thread. Your story becomes a list of points, at which point you would have been better to do a PowerPoint presentation.

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I digress. You get the point. (Welcome to my brain.)

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That’s a hard dance at the best of times, but it’s hardest when you have a house as thoughtful, as detailed and as carefully put together as our Best House Aotearoa 2024, the home of ceramicist Lucy Coote and architect Mark Leong.

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The plans the couiple developed for the renovation of their original 1904 brick villa at the end of the street, at the end of central Wellington – a kind of full stop for the city – are on one level distinctive, clear-eyed and rational. A U-shaped brick extension around a courtyard, with a lovely flow of spaces.

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There are a million compelling things to talk about in the house: the house responds to its context, responds to its heritage, responds to the way they live. The colours are wonderful. They chose brick because it spoke to both of them, one as an architect and one as a potter. They mixed humble materials and basic carpentry with really lovely spaces… And there’s a lovely brick oculus beside the stairs outside which is a gentle nod to Leong’s Chinese-Malaysian ancestry. All that is without getting into the fact that a long time ago Mark was part of a band called So So Modern, and whether there are connections between architecture and music.  

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And yet: it feels effortless, simple, restrained. A pale brick extension added to a lovely old house, with a sense of craft. You get the sense that, despite all the influences and thoughts and ideas and processes and experiments and discussions and logic and iterations and fine fine details, they very sensibly came back to the same intuitive question every time: does this feel right?

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And the answer, of course, is yes, it does feel most truly right. Congratulations, Mark and Lucy, you have a wonderful home.

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