H O M E
Sweet valley high BY R AC H E L H E LY E R D O N A L D S O N P H OTO G R A P H Y BY A N N A B R I G GS
‘W
e don’t get any noise from the road, we get all-day sun and we’re sheltered from the southerly so it’s a really nice spot. As soon as you get up out of the valley, it’s quite secluded,’ says Aaron Thornton. For Aaron and his partner Tomoko Hasegawa, life in their new-build home on a bush-clad Brooklyn hilltop, north of Happy Valley, is pretty blissful. The steepness of their road is bit of a shock, even for Wellington, but it spirits you away to a place high above the heavy traffic of industrial Ohiro Road. Their cedar and storm-blue steel-clad house perches high on a hill, 130m above sea level, trapping the sunshine and overlooking a verdant valley of tree ferns, eucalyptus, and pine. Aaron and Tomoko met in Wellington in 2004. Shortly after, they set up vegetarian cafe Pranah in Newtown, and ran it for seven years. These days Aaron, who grew up in Wainuiomata and studied computer science at Victoria, is a web developer for Storypark, an app for early childhood teachers. Tomoko, who is originally from Kyoto, works as a counsellor to Japanese exchange students and at CBD restaurant Hey Ramen. The couple have lived in their house since November 2018, but they owned the land for three years before any work began. The site they bought was ‘a piece of dirt’, says Aaron. Its steep topography had put off potential developers for decades. Part of a very old Wellington subdivision, ‘done in the UK in the 1800s without any regard to the actual land’, it was never developed because of the extreme constraints on access and building. There were no utility services whatsoever and no access road. ‘I think that scared a lot of people: the uncertainty – how expensive was it going to be to build up there, and to get the services.’ The couple delayed their build in the hope that the subdivision would progress to adding services and a road. But in the end, they went ahead with their dream home, beginning construction in February 2018. The original design, by architects Cecile Bonnifait and William Giesen, was for an off-grid house, with water tanks and solar batteries. Tomoko and Aaron’s brief was ‘a strong connection with all the nature that’s around here, with our surroundings’. They also wanted a small footprint, with a low impact on the environment. Bonnifait and Giesen Architects designed the house as a simple three-level tower with a 50sqm footprint.
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