The Wellington flat project

We have a house in Mount Cook, Wellington, the capital of New Zealand.  Wellington is a small city of around 150,000 residents located at the extreme south of the North Island.  Wellington is fairly unique by New Zealand standards for being relatively densely developed.  This is largely due to topography: Wellington's location (a virtual peninsula) means that it is constrained by coastline on three sides, and it is also extremely hilly.  A local landmark is the Brooklyn Wind Turbine at 299m above sea level, and it's less than 5km from our house.  The constraints of topography and coastline combine to result in the iconic urban landscape of pastel coloured villas tumbling down hillsides.




Because of the hilly nature of Wellington, it's common for houses to be built on sloping sites.  Some of the steeper sites have staircase access, or in the case of  the cliff-hanging house, the house itself forms the stairs.  There are around 300 privately owned cable cars in Wellington to mitigate the step problem.  In any case, our house is no exception.  From the front the house appears to be a bungalow on a flat section but the ground slopes away rapidly to the back, to the extent that it is a two story property at the back, and you have to go down the deck stairs to reach the garden.  The basement of the property is well above head height at the back sloping down to around 1 metre at the front.  The development potential of the underutilised basement is one of the reasons we bought the place.

Our house is approximately 1km from the city centre in an area zoned "inner residential".  When we bought the house we were focussing on an area close to the city because we value the proximity to facilities, including shops, cinemas, bars and work.  We are close enough to walk to the city and with good public transport access too you can easily live without a car. It is areas like this that are ideal for intensification.  Intensification means getting more dwellings out of the land area.  Think Hong Kong and other constrained land areas where flats result in more people living close to facilities.  Dense cities are often great places to live since minimal time is wasted commuting.  Examples are Vancouver, often cited as the world's best place to live, New York, San Francisco, and Singapore.  Living in a dense environment is not for everyone, but it works really well where there are existing facilities nearby.  With a supermarket on our doorstep, regular bus services and the ability to walk to work, we have the ability to create a new home without gobbling up more greenfield land.  There is a good chance that whoever moves into our new flat will live a low-carbon existence and hopefully enjoy all the nearby amenities which are, of course, the reason we bought the house in the first place.  We can't provide a car park, even if we wanted to, but hopefully they won't need one.

Anyway, that's the theory.  The practice is we've got building consent to build a 45m² one bedroom flat in our basement.  It will be accessed via the garden path with a separate mains connection meaning we can rent it as a separate dwelling.

Next blog - the big dig.