Located in Wellington’s inner residential suburb of Newtown - well serviced by mixed use activities in the form of retail shops, schools, employment and public transport - this flat site of 607m2 had one badly maintained house on it. The property fronts onto a quiet cul-de-sac and an adjoining public park.

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The property faced north and west and directly overlooked Carrara Park, a large urban park with a children’s playground, expansive green lawn and mature trees throughout.  This meant it was a perfect place for development, and the brief was to design as many units as possible.  The inner residential zoning combined with the pre-1930s heritage laws preventing demolition of the existing house, along with flood zones in this low-lying basin meant a long drawn-out resource consent process. However we managed to successfully argue the benefits of 6 townhouses for the site with the Wellington Council.

 

The design includes a single building containing five 3 storey residential units and one 2 storey residential unit, centrally located to break the roofline where it steps from 3 storeys on either side to 2 storeys at this point. The proposed units are all similarly designed with floor layouts generally consisting of; Ground level – Single garage, bedroom and bathroom; First Level – Kitchen/dining area, living space and outdoor deck/balcony area; and Second Level (excluding unit 4) – Two bedrooms and a bathroom.  On a finer scale the building form is broken up further to mitigate its scale with deep recesses, roof overhangs and protruding decks and changes in cladding. This makes smaller building blocks similar in scale to the surrounding older houses. The modulation of the facades of the building (different for those that face onto the park and the driveway) provide a visually interesting building, with a great deal of glass. These characteristics allow a reciprocal relationship between the park and the interior spaces of the houses to be visible, and this in turn activates the edges of the park.