Home Tours

This former rental property becomes home for two happy families

Article by Your Home and Garden

Meet the people who converted the ground floor of this ex-rental property

meet & greet

Brendon Veysey (police officer), Tori Veysey (graphic designer), Van, seven, Cruz, four, and Billy, 18 months.

The property

An eight-bedroom, two-storey home in Cambridge.

What started out as a bit of a joke between friends, has resulted in something a little more serious – a beautiful home for the Veysey family, surrounded by great neighbours and their best mates who live upstairs.

When Tori and Brendon Veysey’s good friend Hilly Goodwin, stumbled across a large two-storey home on 1400sqm, with a generous floorspace of 170sqm upstairs and the same downstairs, she sent the Trade Me link to Tori. They laughed about starting a commune with their two families.

Curiosity piqued, they went to an open home to check it out and understand why the price was lower than they expected for such a large home.

“The home was being sold as a four-bedroom house as the downstairs wasn’t consented. But it had eight bedrooms and the property was being rented out as three separate properties in the one house,” says Tori. With the size and the price, the home quickly became less of a joke and more like a property for the four to seriously consider with the option of converting it into two separate homes. Brendon and Tori had almost finished renovating their home in Cambridge and were pretty settled, but they knew they’d be needing more space in the future for their growing family.

But the home wasn’t pretty and needed a lot of work if two families were going to live in it. “Downstairs felt like a dungeon with no windows on one side of the building. It was filthy and the section was completely overgrown and covered in wiggly Dr Seuss-style Christmas trees. The whole thing was bizarre,” says Tori.

Two’s a crowd

The two couples sat down to seriously consider putting in an offer and discussed how it could work for two families to purchase the home together. “With the house being subdividable, it felt like a decision that could work well for all of us,” says Tori.

Together, the two couples purchased the huge property with the long-term plan to renovate the entire home and later subdivide the section and possibly build.

Getting stuck in

The Goodwins would live upstairs and the Veyseys would live downstairs. Upstairs was a little bit retro, but liveable. Downstairs had to be gutted and renovated before anyone could move in. The couples agreed on the budget, then the Veyseys were free to do what they wanted, frequently checking in with each other to make sure everyone remained happy with the progress.

The Veyseys lived in one half of their house, while they gutted and renovated the other half. For almost 12 months they lived as a family of four using a tiny kitchen without a properly functioning oven or even kitchen cupboards, living as simply as possible.

“We had one plate and one fork per person as we didn’t have storage space. We had just left our beautifully renovated kitchen in our previous home, but we had to keep it in perspective, we knew it was short term and that some people have much worse kitchens.”

Making a plan

The downstairs renovation was a complicated endeavour, but with Brendon’s building background, the couple felt confident to take it on. Brendon led the build in any spare time outside of his full-time shift work for the police. As the walls are concrete, there wasn’t a lot of flexibility for moving rooms around, and much of the layout depended on where the current pipes were already placed.

With the help of The Architecture People, they worked out the best way to optimise the space they had and reconfigure the kitchen and bathroom. The original layout had the bathroom door right off the kitchen.

“The shower was something you would see at a school camp, a concrete box raised off the ground. It really felt like you were climbing into a dungeon. I hated that shower. That shower has now become part of my ensuite. We tiled it and it’s turned into my favourite room in the house,” says Tori.

Because of the positioning of the original pipes, the bedrooms needed to be on the far side of the house,
a long length of windowless concrete hard up against a dirt bank. To get some much-needed light along this side, the dirt outside was dug out with retaining walls put in to get some space for the windows to be put in.

“We were somewhat limited with our options, so we made the windows as wide as we could (while looking proportionate to the room) to optimise the light. We could only go down in height to a certain point.”

Good neighbours

When it came to designing the kitchen, a compromise needed to be made. “We could either have a garage or a dining room. Our last house didn’t have a garage and it was our only regret with that property.”

A tough decision was made to forgo a dining room in favour of a large garage to store toys and tools. As the kitchen footprint was small, the couple utilised an open-plan style with a kitchen bench that fits four stools to be perched on for meals.

The choice of cabinetry and benchtop was pretty easy. “We had literally just finished renovating our own home before moving here and I loved what I’d chosen, so I got the same concrete look for the benchtop. It’s a laminate without a repeated pattern so it doesn’t look like a laminate. It looks natural,” says Tori.

The kitchen merges with the lounge and flows out to the deck with large bifold doors. “It was designed so it could open right up. We built a deck the length of the lounge, so in summer it’s great to eat out there on the outdoor table.”

But wintery indoor weather doesn’t stop the Veyseys from hosting large dinner parties.

“We have dinner with the Goodwins once a week and we alternate at each other’s place. Without
a dining room, we can easily fit nine of us.

“We have an amazing community here and each week we also have a weekly shared dinner with our extended neighbours. There are four or five families and we alternate hosting. We sometimes host 16-20 people inside and it’s no drama. In the summer we host barbecues with the wider neighbourhood too, it’s cool to have that neighbourly vibe.”

Cohesive design

As a graphic designer, Tori has an eye for design and creating cohesive spaces that connect visually throughout the home.

The mostly white interior and concrete flooring space is softened with ply accents that flow throughout the house in various forms; through timber slats on the ceiling, shelving and negative detailing, a plywood wall in the lounge and boys’ bedroom and headboards.

There’s another neighbourhood connection here too. “Our neighbour Matt owns Fiasco [a company producing road cases for event touring]. During the pandemic, they switched quickly and made kitset work-from-home desks, supplying us with high-quality plywood for our design features. And Hilly works with Matt, too,” says Tori.

The result

With clear communication on how home co-ownership would work, a legal contract and respectful boundaries the arrangement is working better than expected. “We can actually go weeks without seeing each other, as we have our own separate entrances and own driveways.”

The couples have also discussed every possible scenario they could see and talked through exit plans for when they are ready to move on to their next endeavours.

“It’s been really cool to do something totally out of the box and for it to work so seamlessly. Honestly, we couldn’t be happier with this alternative home ownership model. We all chip in and help each other out and the kids love hanging out with our neighbours. In fact, our property has gates into two of our other neighbours’ properties, all young families who we have dinner with weekly, it’s really, really cool and it’s been an unexpected blessing,” says Tori.