Pooled Resources

No matter how much we may love our siblings, most of us are content to stop cohabitating when we leave our parents’ home. A few of us go on to share flats during university, or when we enter the work force, but for most, that’s still a stretch.

A decade ago, Sarah and David Welsh took the rare step of turning sibling cohabitation into co-ownership. For ten years they lived together in their dark Grey Lynn bungalow, sometimes with flatmates, sometimes with partners. It worked, but when David and his partner had a baby, the feeling was that the house was much too small. Then when the siblings heard of the death of the elderly owner of a property across the street, it sparked an idea: if they bought the house, and could also buy the empty lot next door, they could extend the turn-of-the-century bungalow from a house barely big enough for one family into a house big enough for two.

“There had to be room enough for all of us,” Sarah tells me. “There needed to be two living spaces – what we call the noisy lounge and the quiet lounge – but because we’d had a flexible living arrangement before, I didn’t want it to be ‘This is our end, this is your end’. I wanted to make sure that it would be communal, because if you’re going to have two completely separate places, you may as well not build a house together. So, it was definitely about living together as a family.”

Architects Natasha McCoy and Miles Heine, of McCoy + Heine, moved the original bungalow south from the northern edge of the property to keep it as far away as possible from the neighbouring house to the north, which kept the original site in almost perpetual shade. They added a modern wing, extending the house to the west, away from the street, towards Grey Lynn Park, a sprawling public space with playgrounds, fields, sports facilities and a pool.

The old bungalow became the primary living quarters for one family (Sarah’s for now, though she hopes they can mix things up in the future) with two bedrooms and a study/sewing room. The new wing houses two bedrooms (currently occupied by David’s family) as well as the main communal areas – an open kitchen and dining room, and an airy lounge, with double-glazing on three sides, opening up to the northern sun and the western park. The lounge is backed to the south by a tall, heavy concrete wall that catches the sun’s heat, warming the house throughout the day. Underneath is a two-bedroom, 70-square-metre tenancy, with separate access from the south side of the house, providing the families with an additional income to soften the blow of purchasing two properties in the overheated Auckland property market.

The new wing is full of deep, dark wood. In the kitchen, lounge and decking, McCoy + Heine utilised totara, a native New Zealand wood that was traditionally used for Maori boat building, and because of its strength and resistance to rot was used as fence posts, floor pilings and railway sleepers in the early twentieth century. The trees have been protected for decades but Haine found a rare source of felled totara that was cleared en masse as part of a large public works program in the early 1980s. The floors are all recycled rimu floorboards, matching those of the original bungalow.

Between the old house and the new is a raised bridge that can be opened up to the breeze in the summer and closed down for warmth in the winter. The bridge could also act as a dividing point between the houses if they ever needed to be separated, re-dividing the property in a new direction. “It was part of the brief that if they found that they no longer wanted this living arrangement, they could separate the two dwellings and operate independently,” Heine tells me.

On the original site of the bungalow, McCoy + Heine worked closely with a landscape architect to turn the oddly-shaped foundation into a functioning fruit and vegetable garden, which connects to the park through a gate in the fence. The garden is centred around an old grapefruit tree – the only plant remaining from the original property – towering above the young natives they’ve planted throughout the garden. “They’re in for the long haul,” McCoy tells me. “A nikau will take forever to grow, but they’ll be lovely when they do”

The prominence of the garden is impressive, unusual in a city fringe suburb, one of the rare benefits of buying two plots and bringing two families together in a single house. From certain angles where you can’t see the neighbours, you could be tricked into thinking you were sitting in a rural villa, the trees from the park framing the fence line. “I grew up on the edge of Hamilton, right by the country and this is the most country-ish inner city house I could live in,” Sarah tells me. “We’ve got green on three sides, which is lucky. Very lucky.”