Street Wise

Gerald Parsonson crafts two exquisite apartments – one to live in and one to rent – for a retired couple.

- Greg Dixon

It’s hard to know where to look in John and Heather Hutton’s handsome central Wellington apartment. There are fabulous views everywhere.

If you face north west, you can see over the top of the well-ordered wilderness of the Botanic Gardens to Tinakori Hill. To the north east, your eye is carried across the central cityscape and wharves to the expanse of Wellington’s harbour and beyond the Huttvalley and the eastern bays. Finally, to the southwest, there’s the shallow curve of Oriental Bay, the heights of Mount Victoria and Miramar peninsula beyond.

Even on a bleak day it’s a wonderful panorama, a capital view, if you will. And the couple’s apartment – one of two they’ve built, perched on top of the other on this beautifully positioned site – presents the viewer with the opportunity to consider it all.

Designed for the couple by Parsonson Architects, the two-apartment project in Kelburn has given them what is likely to be their final home, but also, with the lower apartment, a rental property – a retirement project for John, who gave up clinical medicine four years ago.

“This will see us out,” says Heather. “And that’s why it’s all on one level,” says John. “I imagined sitting here in the winter garden in a wheelchair, with my legs under a rug and my dentures in a glass over there, looking at that view.”