Swell Productions
When architect Mark Leong and his ceramicist wife Lucy Coote saw a two-bedroom villa online in 2019 in Wellington’s Berhampore, they were taken with it. They were living in Sydney with their young twin daughters at the time and wanted to move home to be closer to family.
The 120-year-old house wasn’t the renovated home that didn’t need work they initially wanted. Still, the heritage features of the home on a corner site and enough space for Lucy to set up a home studio proved irresistible, so they bought the place and set about transforming it.
As an architect with his own practice, Studio Myla, Mark’s plan was to have three bedrooms, a bathroom and dining area in the original house, retrofitted with Vantage double-glazing windows, and a long brick extension.
It would house the kitchen, with floor-to-ceiling sliding doors leading out to a sheltered courtyard, a fourth bedroom that could be used as a den and/or playroom and Lucy’s self-contained studio. From the street, it looks like two train carriages joined by glass.
With new double-glazed windows retrofitted, the original walls now lined and insulated, along with an insulated concrete slab floor and Solux-E low-e glass used in the extension, Lucy says the reconfigured home feels completely different now. “It used to have a lot of breezes going through the floor and windows on stormy nights,” she says. “It feels really calm and solid in here.”
“I just love the way we live in the house now.”
‘The reconfigured home feels completely different now’
Homeowners Mark Leong and Lucy Coote had their old villa’s original windows retrofitted with Vantage Double Glazing utilising Metro Series joinery and Solux-E low-e glass. On stormy nights, the family used to feel the breezes going through the floor and old windows, but not anymore.
See more of this home at vantage.co.nz/salad-days
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