A larger house was drawn and priced before the numbers stopped making sense, so an 80sqm minor dwelling went up instead, with interiors by Jess Blair of Forager Studio.
You hear the welcome party before you see it. Lentil and Pippa, two Cairn terriers, dash up the hill, across the grass where the big house was meant to go, and escort you down. From the road there isn’t much to look at: a long, low rectangle under a single gable, clad in vertical timber, without a window facing the street. The pavers underfoot, though, alternate pink and grey the whole way down.
Inside, everything is pink: the walls, the ceilings, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. Brown and caramel come in as you go. The rooms cocoon rather than shout, and it’s a comfortable place to stand still.
Summar Connelly and Sam Harrison hadn’t planned to build anything like it. Building for themselves for the first time, they’d spent months planning a much bigger house for this section, all concrete and timber, in a faintly 1970s mood. They were far enough through to know what the cabinetry would be when the price started to move out of range, and they stopped with it. What they could still do was put a minor dwelling on the same land: a second, smaller house that the rules cap at 80sqm, which left future plans open down the track.
Not going big turned out to be the thing that let them go bold. Where the larger house had needed neutral walls and floors nobody could object to, this one answered to them. “In the back of our minds we were always thinking, if we had to sell, someone needs to want to buy it,” says Sam. “Whereas this project was such a weird proposition that we stopped caring about that. It’s 80 square metres. How crazy can we make it?”
A builder by trade, Sam was on the tools, and decided that the fewer angles the better, so a linear box was the best move. “We thought about what we could do with a simple shape,” he says, “and then the inside was where we added interest.” There was a saving in it, too: “Building everything ourselves was how we could have fun on a constrained budget.”
They’d already been choosing colours for the earlier scheme, where the bathrooms and a front door were as far as they felt able to push it. The pink chosen for that door is the one that came with them. “There was a brief early on for burgundy and > butter yellow, which was cool,” says Summar, “but in my head it was always pink.”
a poster from Tim Ross: The Mid Century Project at CoCA.
Jess Blair of Forager Studio had been with them from the start, and this was nothing like what they’d been planning together. She saw that a house this size could take a completely different approach: colour-blocking the whole interior in shades of pink, with no white walls anywhere. “We used the deeper shades to anchor the kitchen island and cabinetry, then let those tones breathe out into softer pinks across the walls and ceiling.
“People will brave a bold paint colour, knowing they can change it,” Jess continues. “Here there was a real commitment to the concept.” The tiles are pink, the stone benchtop is pink.
the left, where an artwork by Grace Bader hangs. The chair is another Pink Elephant find.
Sam got curious about how far it could go. Pink cork floors were the one thing Summar talked him out of. Then the painters arrived and it was her nerve that went. “I was so scared,” she says. “I’d text them every hour asking for photos, because I wasn’t sure it was going to work out.” “It’s only paint,” says Sam.
It worked. You come in at the back, into a lounge where the ceiling is low and flat. Further in it lifts to follow the gable over the kitchen, which is the one place the house stretches. “There are windows along one elevation bringing in a lot of light, and a pitch in the ceiling that gives the room height and movement,” says Jess. “Those moments of relief are what make a small, highly expressive space liveable.”
The island and banquette were drawn together to ground them in the room. The dining table was treated separately, as the room’s hero piece, and Sam made that as well. “He’s built furniture before and I have a thing about proportions,” says Summar, “so having Jess draw it up ensured it was right.” The bathroom next door takes its own slice of the city.
They’d lived small already, so the size was never in question, and it hasn’t cost them any company. Nights in with friends overflow onto the deck, there’s book club and a birthday party every year, and anyone wanting to stay takes the couch.
Living on the hill has been generous in ways they hadn’t counted on, with privacy they didn’t expect this close to town and dog walks straight off the doorstep. Building new brought something their previous renovation lacked, too. “I used to think I got seasonally depressed,” says Summar. “I think I might just have been cold.”
The platform for the bigger house is still empty, planted with natives that are slowly taking hold. They may have got here in a roundabout way, but it’s exactly what they need. “If we’d not committed to it,” says Summar, “we’d be sitting here thinking, ‘Why are we living in a boring one-bedroom house?’”
Ask them what they enjoy most and the answer is entirely ordinary. Sam cooks, Summar reads, and the dogs take the couch. None of that needs a pink house. All of it’s better in one.
It was supposed to be what they lived in until the real house happened. It turns out this is the real home.
Words Alice Lines
Photography Sarah Rowlands
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