Ponsonby

Our clients could not find a home they could afford in the city they wanted to live in. So instead of compromising, they built the building.

The result is mixed use across three levels: retail at street level, two apartments to rent out, and the owners' own home on the top floor with a rooftop entertaining area and pool. Their home is the one pictured here, but we designed and specified all three apartments, with different kitchens and bathrooms on every level.

It was an ambitious project by any measure, and it drew enough attention to be featured on Grand Designs, where presenter Chris Moller described the approach as "urban farming" and saw the couple as pioneering a genuinely new way of living in the city.

Working across three separate dwellings in one building meant holding two ideas at once. Each apartment needed to work properly on its own terms, for whoever ended up living in it. And the whole building needed to feel like one considered piece of architecture rather than three unrelated fitouts stacked on top of each other.

The owners' apartment is where the brief was most personal. It had to be a real family home, not a penthouse in the showy sense, with the rooftop pool and entertaining area as an extension of the living space rather than a feature bolted on top.

The two rental apartments were a different exercise again, closer to the work we do for developers: specified to be robust, to let well, and to look considered without being to anyone's specific taste.

A building that earns its keep and a home that feels like one. Our clients live at the top of something they built themselves, with an income from the floors below. It is a genuinely creative response to a problem a lot of Auckland families are wrestling with, and it was a privilege to work on.