Down a winding cul-de-sac in the Wellington suburb of Khandallah, architect Anne Kelly of a.k.a. architecture worked with a young family to bring warmth and light to a solid but tired 1960s house. The home’s modernist bones, and a mutual love of mid-century architecture by both architect and client, made for a smooth renovation that respected the house’s origins. “We were totally in sync in terms of a modernist and simple aesthetic, and this influenced many of the design choices,” Kelly says.

The house is really two parts. From the street, the closer part with garaging underneath is a large, open-plan living-dining-kitchen room. The rear of the house contains bedrooms and bathrooms through a corridor. The programme for the rear of the house was more straightforward, focussing on turning the bedrooms and bathroom into warm and pleasant spaces; the bedrooms are now cosy and secluded thanks to the home’s bush setting. There is also now a self-contained apartment in this rear part of the house, accessed from the pathway down the side.

The front of the house was where the real transformation took place. Accessed up a dogleg staircase from the new front door, the main living-dining-kitchen space was originally an elongated room with a wide gable roof. Kelly has expanded the space modestly on two sides to create a light-filled, generous room with views over the valley.

Closer to the street in this open-plan room, Kelly made the critical intervention of an extension clad in charred larch. It is this extension that gives the house its new character from the street, with two dark forms intersecting amidst otherwise light-coloured houses. These forms not only expand the living area dramatically, but give the room its interior character. For instance, the extension’s roofline is subtly offset from the roofline of the original house, and the direction of the pitches are also offset, so that the living area has its own character and feeling within the one open-plan room.

In this new space, a bay window, using a fixed-pane Vantage Metro Series window, looks back over the street. Contrasting strongly with the otherwise white interior, the black bay window protrudes into the room, inviting you to come and sit, to ponder. It’s a single, substantial pane that pulls the bush view deep into the interior of the house and is visible all the way down the bedroom corridor at the rear of the house. It also gives this part of the room its own character, which can be a challenge to achieve in large modernist open-plan spaces.

On the other side of this room, above the single garage, Kelly managed to fit a north-facing deck accessed via a Metro Series sliding door for ease of use in summer. “This deck wasn’t part of the original plans,” Kelly says, “but we managed to achieve it thanks to the nature of the forms. We wanted more efficient space without necessarily additional space.” Above the sliding door are two more small windows which pick up on the modernist sensibility of the other windows in this room and add functionality during the summer months.

One of the most notable features of this house’s transformation is an unusual one: the absence of any significant problems during the whole process. Both architect and clients speak to how well managed the process was, with clear communication and a similar design sensibility ensuring everyone was on the same page. It was a job well done, summed up by Kelly: “Done.”

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