How an Architect Turned a Crumbling Garage into a Flexible Three-Level Home, New Zealand

I was always drawn to the idea of a tower. I've always been drawn to surprise, delight, a little bit of quirk and colour. Getting up high, grabbing the views, grabbing the winter sun. Working with a small footprint design, I think it's really important to have a plan that works really hard and spaces have multi-uses. This house has kind of got the functionality of a much larger house. Got the hair salon, the multi-use space, a guest nook. My name's Micah, I'm an architect in Wellington, New Zealand. I designed and built this place with my partner Ivan, who's a hairdresser. Wellington's a really special place. It's nestled in between the coast, the harbour and these amazing hills. We're in the suburb of Brooklyn, high up on the ridgeline. We've got these beautiful views as well to the south. What's kind of amazing is that once you get up onto these hills in Brooklyn, we feel like we're a world away from the city. Back in 2017, a couple of friends bought their first home, a bungalow. I noticed they had this crumbling garage out the front. I was kind of interested in this idea of converting a garage into a house and see Wellington is dotted around with these. Every second place has a mouldy garage. We've got four here, there's another one there. There are a couple on the other side of the road. And it was actually too small to get a modern car in, so it was really of no use to anyone. I was really drawn to the site, partly for the idea of living really close to my friends, but also because it was going to be a real challenge. So the influences for the house, Roger Walker is a really well-known Wellington architect from the 60s and 70s. His places are filled with life and colour, varied forms. He loves a bit of drama. When I was a kid, I got given a book by my dad and there were sketches of his places and dad used to take me around and we'd try and find them on the hills of Wellington. Maybe we'd see a turret poking up through the greenery or something. The house is basically an extruded garage and to liven up the façade and give it a bit of variety, we've played with a lot of sort of punched windows. We wanted to break up the mass of the façade also, and so we've got this wee joke window. It's just tiny and a bit of fun really. The building's actually made out of blockware. Blocks are really great because it's both the structure and the weathertightness all in one. They're modular, they go up quick and they're pretty cheap. The whole house is dug into the hillside. We had to provide services to the back house. We've got all their pipes coming down and so we thought let's just turn it into a cute wee fairy garden and Ivan had the idea of using some old rocks just as steps. Yeah, kind of simple. You just go up. And yeah, we just usually use them to just do the gardening and watering the plants when it's hot. This video is sponsored by Bamboo Lab. We made a few simple fixes for our space. Like this plant stand, this pegboard attachment, and these kitchen cupboard organizers all by ourselves. Well, with a little help from the Bamboo Lab A1, Bamboo Lab's Makerworld gives you access to thousands of ready-to-print projects and their ecosystem also includes a large range of filaments and accessories. The A1 has a noise cancelling feature which makes the printing virtually quiet. Great for small spaces. We found this plant stand on Makerworld. It's designed to slot neatly into an existing bookshelf. No measuring, no cutting, just more room where you didn't have it before. Nice. We also found this pegboard picture frame attachment. Now with this hook, we can finally hang our wall clock. For our kitchen, we printed a bin bag holder and a dishwasher tablet container. These can attach directly to a door, taking it from this to this. Who knew you could be so neat and organized? With tools like the Bamboo Lab A1 and the beginner-friendly experience Bamboo Lab offers, making things yourself suddenly feels a lot more doable. Curious what else you could make? Find out more via the link in the description. We needed to provide garage doors, so we've actually used a double bifold. We've stenciled some yellows and blues. It's right by the road edge and it just livens up the street. It was one of the planning requirements that we needed to provide two car parks. So we've built a flexible space and the primary function is Agnes' hair salon. Kind of explains why we've got these triple doors here. So it can open right up and let a car in. Stepping into the entrance, we have this kind of Genkan-like space. We've added a yellow storage cabinet hook on the side of the doors to hang up a trampoline. We've also got this really great mirror that we put in. It's full width and it really opens out the space and makes it feel a lot larger and bounces into the light. We wanted this to definitely not feel like a garage, so we've built this floating floor that can be removed. We've covered it with cork, which we laid ourselves. One of the bonuses of doing this floating floor was to use the space for some added insulation. The clock's actually Ivan's clock. We've just got this little yellow hook where we keep all our keys. I'm terrible at losing keys, so that's pretty good for me. So behind the curtain we have Ivan's hair salon, which takes up a good portion of the ground floor space. What's really great about this is there's no door. There's no hard edge between the public space and the private space. That's where I spend most days with my clients, which is really nice because it's private. I play nice music. I usually feed them as well because I love cooking and feeding people. So it's kind of like a friendly salon. We also have a laundry chute from the bedroom above, so that's pretty convenient with the washer dryer underneath. When we have friends to stay, we decamp all of the equipment from the hair salon, pull out a blow-up mattress, and we convert it into a temporary bedroom for our friends when they come and stay. The remaining part of the space is flexible, and we use it for yoga, music, and Ivan has his gym rings here. We decided we'd sacrifice three or four square meters to bring the light down from above. In doing so, we've actually gained the use of this whole ground floor. It would just be a cave otherwise. It doesn't feel like you're in a cave, basically. So we brought the staircase down onto this plinth actually, which allows us to get storage, camping gear, suitcases, and also a deep built-in pot plant down the back corner. That's me. I look after all the plants. He's the green fingers. We added growing lights because Wellington doesn't get a lot of sun. This is actually a kit set that comes from Australia. These are the individual steps, and then they cut these rings and space them all out so it perfectly fits your stud height. Yeah, it was quite a moment of the build seeing it come together, and like, wow, okay, the space suddenly starts to make sense. I was very undecided on the color, and my friend Ali is an artist, and she's like, Micah, it just has to be red. It kind of kicked the whole color scheme in a different direction. When you arrive on the landing, the first thing you see is a mirror with this floating hand basin. The hand basin itself was made by a friend of ours. It's a nice wee piece to show off on the landing. The mirror also makes the whole landing feel a lot larger, and drawers are also a relatively expensive cabinetry item, so this is a kind of cheap hack. I asked the metalworkers to just make a wee hole in there. We were originally thinking maybe hang a plant off it, but then I was like, oh, it's perfect for a hand towel, so here we have it. The bathroom pod where the toilet and shower is actually conceived of kind of like a large closet. It's just a wee box. For the shower tray, we used a stainless steel tray. The thinking around this was that the shower could actually double as like a laundry tub. We've got an extra hose in here, so we can hose down tramping shoes or dirty clothes. It wasn't possible to get an exterior window in the shower, but instead we inserted this really small interior window which brings in secondary light from the void space. The bedroom space is a relatively small space. It's got a really low ceiling height of about 2.1 meters, and that's partly because of the planning restrictions that were really compressing us in terms of height. But we've exposed all of the beams in the space just to give it a bit of extra height. There's no door to the bedroom. I think this really helps in a small space. The wardrobe in the room is actually a bit more than a wardrobe. It's a space for our towels and our linen. The top shelf we use just for sleeping bags and jackets and seldom used items. The low bed really works well in this space. Being small, it doesn't dominate the room. It's actually been recycled from my old bed. I decided to go for a couple of integrated bedside tables. Sort of a simple drawer mechanism. We popped this yellow panel in here. It was actually because a sheet of plywood wasn't quite wide enough to do the whole room. We also have a shelf for Ivan. Ivan's got a small drawer here, but on the other side is the laundry chute. It's great. We just drop things in here and it lands down at the washing machine below. I wanted to break up the mass of the main elevation, and so we introduced this little joke window. We aligned it with the radiator, so it just made a bit of sense in the room. For lighting, we have these adjustable wall lights. Using the depth of the ceiling just adds a little bit more volume. Concrete floor is interesting. The structural engineer really wanted this to stiffen up the whole structure, but when it was done, the builders did a fantastic job of it, and they're like, well, let's just leave it. Let's just run with it. As you come up the stairs to the top floor, we have this open kitchen, living, and dining space where we spend most of our time. The kitchen's divided into two parts. There's one part above the stair landing, and then there's the main bench. The main bench is treated like a piece of joinery. We've integrated all of the appliances just to make the space feel a bit calmer. We were really mindful of not having a tall, bulky, standard fridge in here. Instead, we've gone for an underbench freezer at this side and an underbench fridge. The size is really not that much less than a regular standard-sized fridge. We have the same wee pull-outs here for the bins and that kind of thing under the sink. The dishwasher is integrated down below, and that leaves us the top portion for pots and pans. The oven we've also lowered down, partly to give us a good-sized utensil and cutlery drawer. That's really handy having the probs right there. For the benchtop, we've gone for a white Corian bench, which helps tie the kitchen in with the rest of the house. Other utensil items that we use on a really regular basis, we hang them up here. The upper cupboards are just simple storage like plates, knick-knacks. We have a microwave hidden behind a door front. The other part of the kitchen is our pantry island. It uses the space above the staircase that is quite often wasted. The bench is actually salvaged kauri, which is a native New Zealand timber. It's in the back corner of the island. We have the wee pull-out and just plug it in anywhere you go. Really similar to the bathroom, so again, it's just a simple door with off-the-shelf pull-outs. Our bulk pantry storage. In the deep drawers, they use the headspace above the spiral stair. The kitchen bench extends out and forms a daybed. We have some open shelving for some pottery and some architecture books. It's a really great place for me to sit and enjoy the view. It's one of my favourite spots in the house. One of the great things about this daybed is you can not only sit and read a book, you can stretch out, have a nap. If you've got friends over, you can pull the dining table out and you can get three people along here. So yeah, we can have six people around the table really easily. So we have a bit of storage under here too. It's just seldomly used things like older blankets and totes and the like. This table is a nice piece. We got it on Trade Me, which is kind of like a New Zealand equivalent of eBay. A mid-century mahogany table and it kind of ties in with what we've got going here. So that's why we liked it. We don't have a sofa, but we have this peanut butter brownie couch. This is what we call it. It's super low, kind of like the bed. There's no backrest, just this movable cushion piece that we just sort of adjust. It's great for two people. We pull it out a little bit and it's really casual. It's a bit of a hoot, a bit of a laugh. It was really important for me during the design process to bring as much winter sun into the space as possible. So we really wanted to have a good size skylight here. We painted the walls a deep red, which is similar in tone to the staircase. It's just toned down a little bit so it's warmer. We have this triple paned sliding door here and really connect the living space to the deck out the back. We have a small timber balcony area and a bridge that connects to our neighbour's garden. It was a bit of a juggle getting the levels to work. So obviously we needed to give enough height to the lower floors. That meant that the living space really needed to be a little bit higher than the top of the stairs. It's worked out that it's a spot where we just perch and have a drink, maybe some lunch. This cabbage tree was always here. The owners up the back had a real fondness for it and I really wanted to keep it. So the deck's actually cut around it. Along the rear we don't have a fence. We've instead planted these miniature bamboo which will grow up to about two, two and a bit metres high. Again, all the succulents is definitely Ivan's territory. So the bridge was actually always part of the design. It's something nice about having a cuboid type form and then something coming off at a 45 degree from the corners. And it works really well with the topography and the way you enter the house. So this is our connection to our friend's property. This is their main entrance and path. But also our friends, if they're coming for dinner or something, they'll just wander up this path across the bridge and into the living space directly. Working with a small footprint design, I think it's really important to have a plan that works really hard and spaces have multi-uses. I was always drawn to building something slightly different, slightly experimental. The design process was really a big exploration, weekend scribbling away. And each time I sort of veered away from this idea of a tower, it just didn't quite sit with me. So yeah, the tower it is. We came back to the original ideas and here we are today.