Stretch And Grow

Rich Naish taps into family heritage to extend a character cottage in Christchurch.

- Jo Bates

When Jo and Alistair Blair were ready to extend their two-bedroom cottage in St Albans, Christchurch, Jo’s award-winning architect cousin Rich Naish was the clear and obvious choice to lead the project. Jo and Rich had spent many family holidays together on their grandfather’s property at Kakanui, near Oamaru in Otago, and they grew up playing around his glasshouses. In recent years, Naish designed a tasting room, restaurant and home at Black Estate in the Waipara Valley for Jo’s twin sister Penelope Naish and her husband Nicholas Brown – a long black building in spectacular landscape.

Though it had survived the Christchurch earthquakes relatively unscathed, the cottage – 72 square metres, timber, dating back to the 1870s – had seen better days. Built askew on the site, it had a gaggle of service rooms out the back, which led to a long, skinny back yard. “In hindsight, the cottage was in bad shape and it probably would’ve been smarter to take the whole thing down,” says Alistair, “but we like that it still appears the same from the street as it always has.”

The Blairs were very fond of their little house – they loved the dining room, with its white tongueand-groove walls, and were keen to retain it. They also wanted to continue actively living in it, not just repurpose the original home for bedrooms. The brief for the extension was to add a bathroom, third bedroom with en suite, and to create a new kitchen-living-dining arrangement. The two bedrooms (one of which would function as a wardrobe) would be retained in the cottage and living areas reworked.