Bringing four generations

Rosemary Pohio laughs that she and Stuart Walker were running against the trend when they tried apartment living more than 12 years ago. The couple, who share six adult children and 14 grandchildren realised that compact living simply couldn’t accommodate the comings and goings of their beloved family and decided they needed to go back to a big family home.

“The kids had left home, but they kept coming back,” she says. “And when the grandchildren came to stay, they liked to come in groups. Apart from a couple of years overseas and in Whangarei, when he graduated, Stuart has barely moved beyond Landscape Rd and Parnell. I was really pushing him across a line to come this far out.”

“Far out” is in the leafy streets of Epsom’s Morvern Rd, close enough to the private hospitals where Stuart is an anaesthetist, with easy access to the motorway to Middlemore Hospital but handy to family.

Rosemary found the 1920s bungalow only a street away from in-laws. She could see that the house could become the heart of gatherings of four generations of family. But first the couple had to clear up a mess of renovations from the last time the house had been touched in the 1960s, enlisting the help of Northland architects Harrison and King who had worked on their bach at Whananaki.

Though some rimu floors and only one set of leadlight windows remained in the house, now framing the window seat in the master bedroom, there was little of the original bungalow detail left. Rosemary insisted on having panelled doors and the deep skirting boards and architraves of the period replicated for the front of the house, searching for an appropriately proportioned mantelpiece to frame the glazed brick fire surround in the formal living room.

Architect Peter Harrison completely reorganised the back of the house, pushing out the original kitchen wall to create an expansive open plan kitchen, dining and family room. The north-facing room opens through bifold doors to a pretty garden that Rosemary has restored with layers of informal planting and plenty of lawn for the children to run around, with a gate to keep little ones safe.

From the formal side entry of the house, visitors can turn right to the original house or left to the family