Golden glow

A brick-and-tile on a quarter-acre section was what working-class dreams were made of in the 1950s. In the Auckland suburb of Westmere, where trams still trundled along the main street, the epitome of living well was a freshly mown lawn and a Ford Prefect parked up in the single-car garage to take out for a Sunday drive.

For five years, the current owners of this land toyed with upgrading the existing state house to meet the full potential of the site. They completed due diligence and budgeted.

The singular, modernist box was not part of their language; they wanted variation in volumes