Magic Trick

Our Best Small Home does more than overcome a difficult site – it makes it into something rather special indeed.

- Greg Dixon

The vertiginous hills and dizzying slopes of Wellington are full of human interventions. Rows of homes perched precariously atop rugged slopes like so many gulls facing into the wind. Some houses seem to hold on tight and peer cautiously over plummeting cliffs, while others appear to carelessly dangle their feet over the edges of deep ravines.

Holly Beals and Grayson Gilmour’s new home, overlooking Island Bay and Cook Strait, is such a place. At the end of an anonymous cul-de-sac, past a gate you nearly miss, and then down a narrow walkway of many, many steps, you find it with its back to the hill, its feet dangling and face presented to the wind. As it gazes across Island Bay and out to sea, the house also appears to float among trees. You can’t help feeling like it’s a kind of magic trick.

Designed for the couple by Caro Robertson and Tim Gittos of Wellington’s SpacecraftArchitects, Beals and Gilmour’s home is a clever but also playful response to a steep and exposed site you’d imagine few people – even Wellingtonians – would have taken on quite so enthusiastically.

Holly, an industrial designer, and Grayson, a musician and composer, found the section on Trade Me three years ago. “It wasn’t advertised very well at all,” says Beals. “There was this terrible picture on a grey, horrible day and a heading that said ‘Challenging, but not impossible’,” she says.