This Wairarapa home was built to hold a slow-growing collection of art, memories and family moments.
There’s a particular kind of confidence in leaving an interior wall bare. Not from lack of ideas, but from knowing that the right thing takes time and that a space needs living in before it can be properly read. When Bridget and Mark Heginbotham moved into their new Greytown home, their art stayed at the old house for six months while the sale settled. By the time it arrived, they knew exactly where everything belonged. Nothing has moved since.
The home they’d left was a converted church hall, renovated by hand and filled over years with mid-century furniture, art and two small boys. Mark grew up in the Wairarapa and they’d landed in Greytown as a practical midpoint, since he was working in Masterton and Bridget in Wellington. The space suited two, and then Frank arrived, then Sonny, and with baby Vera on the way, a single generous volume with no outdoor living was no longer the right fit. “We were leaving the house two or three times a day just to burn the boys’ energy off,” says Bridget. “We thought that was normal at the time.”
When they found a section, 500 metres away, triple the size and backed by an established tōtara reserve, they called architect Daniel Smith of Edwards White Architects. The brief was a description of how they wanted to live: somewhere the kids could disappear to, a proper connection to outside, a sunken lounge, and they had a thing for bricks.
Two wings arranged in an L enclose a central courtyard, the living arm and the bedroom arm connected by a long internal passage that doubles, naturally, as a gallery wall. The sunken lounge sits within the open plan as a room of its own, lower than the main floor and distinct in atmosphere. Above, a compact first floor holds the main bedroom suite, a place to decompress at the end of a day spent largely at the level of small children. The detached garage sits to one side, clearing the entry for the courtyard to do its work.
Before drawing anything, Daniel spent a full day walking the back roads around Greytown. Woolsheds, farm buildings, the odd brick chimney wall sitting abandoned at the edge of a paddock — the building carries all of it. A monopitch form in corrugated metal sits alongside reclaimed brick sourced by Bridget and Mark from the demolished Wairarapa Hospital, topped up through Trade Me and Marketplace finds. A single bricklayer laid every one of them, a process that was, in Bridget’s words, fun and slightly stressful in equal measure.
Larch brings warmth alongside the brick and metal, and a deep soffit above the outdoor living area blocks direct sunlight, the brick below absorbing heat through the day and releasing it slowly. Similarly, in a Greytown summer the back of the house catches the last rays of the day, the brick diffusing it to something you want to sit in rather than escape from. Sliding doors open fully across the back of the living space so that a westerly breeze moves straight through.
Daniel’s design process didn’t stop at the house. His concept included retaining walls and hard landscaping stretching out to meet the site at its edges. The plan also had to absorb some surprises: a 100-year flood plain and an overland flow path running through the middle of the section required the garage to sit detached and the pool to shift. The section ended up tiered, the pool landing 15 metres from the house in a clear sightline from the kitchen, a stretch of open lawn between them deliberately kept free of paving and planting so there’s plenty of room for neighbourhood cricket matches.
Bridget dealt with the flow path by sketching an S-curve and asking a friend whether he could build a boardwalk over it. He figured it out over a few weekends. Another friend, a civil engineer, made the pool fence and a sculpture for the garden, because nothing off the shelf was something they wanted to look at every day.
Bridget and Mark’s decorating decisions at the old church hall told Daniel everything he needed to know about them as collectors. “The art was proudly at the centre of everyday life,” he says. The house he designed reflects that understanding — wall space held open, light kept indirect, the collection given room alongside the life of the house.
Mark grew up going to galleries with his parents, who have since built on the adjacent section, the sensibility that shaped him just next door. “It wasn’t so prescribed that it was like this wall is for this specific piece,” says Bridget. “More that we just needed space.”
Throwing themselves into the interior, they worked alongside Jess Anderson from Edwards White, going back and forth on how bold to go with materials and colour. In the end they landed on letting the collection do that work rather than paint, the kitchen and living spaces staying white, brick and concrete anchoring the palette. “Comfortable, adaptable and genuinely lived in” was Daniel’s aim, “nothing too precious” — and that’s exactly what they’ve made of it.
Bridget’s approach to interiors runs on instinct and a genuine love of sourcing. “The hunt is part of it,” she says. “Rather than just, I need a chair — gotta whip down the road and get whatever I can find.” She’s currently on a life mission to find the right chair for the bedroom corner. It’ll come. The Murano glass pendants for the ensuite spent three weeks in Customs because she hadn’t known duties were a thing. The brown carpet was committed to before Mark had fully signed off. “It was a real gamble,” she says, “but it’s paid off.” The powder room is, in her own words, completely rogue. Yellow grout, blue and white tile, a scheme drawn from the Ganni showroom in Copenhagen. The tiler had his reservations, then came back with his apprentices to show them the finished result.
Downstairs, the sunken lounge belongs to the kids until seven: squabs repurposed as walls and ramparts, the drawers beneath the built-ins packed with Duplo. After that it’s Bridget and Mark’s, open to the kitchen but distinct enough to feel like a different room. The fireplace at one end is substantial and runs largely on atmosphere rather than heat. “It’s more for the vibes,” says Bridget.
Mark’s favourite hour is the one after he arrives home from work. The kids dash between lawn and pool, neighbourhood friends spill in from the cul-de-sac, and the tōtara reserve rises behind it all. “We don’t really need to leave our street,” he says. Somewhere in the reserve, a flying fox has appeared. Slowly, steadily they’re still finding spots for things.
Words Alice Lines
Photography Simon Wilson
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