Green gables

On a typical Westmere street in Auckland, this black-clad double-gabled home stands tall — unrecognisable from the original bungalow whose bones were used to form the basis of an extensive renovation.

Loosening the belt on the unreinforced brick bungalow that had stood on the site since the 1940s was an important part of assessing where the opportunities lay, architect Jon Smith of Matter Architects says. There were many of those, but there were also inherent challenges in the constrained footprint, and, most predominantly, in a 2009 two-storey addition housing a garage and bedroom above that had leaked slowly