Colleen Hawkes

Racking up more than 3000 views within a few hours of being listed, this Thorndon villa looks nothing like it did before its makeover. reports.

Renovating a 1904 villa is not a job for the fainthearted when you want to bring it up to the standard of a new build – this project took owners Mark and Nicki Stephens four years to complete.

And you can be sure the Thorndon, Wellington, villa didn’t look anything like this when they first set eyes on it in 2014, which is one of the reasons the new listing is attracting plenty of attention. More than 3000 people had viewed the house on Trade Me within a few hours of it being listed on Tuesday.

The couple have totally transformed the house, simultaneously modernising it while bringing back the original charm.

‘‘At some time in the 60s or 70s, someone took all the character out of it,’’ Mark Stephens says. ‘‘They even replaced the windows in the front room. It was awful, and we just thought, ‘What have they done to this poor old house?’.’’

The couple, who moved into the house in 2015, were shown a photo of the neighbourhood taken in 1920 and they could see the property: ‘‘We thought, right, we’ll take it back to how it looked originally.’’

With the desire to add a large extension to accommodate a new open-plan living area, the couple hired Inside Design to come up with plans, and they themselves had a substantial input into the finished result. Mark Stephens even took a couple of years off work to help with the project – and they lived in the house while the work was carried out.

‘‘We had this vision of great inner-city living that wasn’t an apartment,’’ he says.

They also wanted to make the cold old house warm, so new insulation was added everywhere. The original sarking on the walls under the Gib was removed and insulation added, as well as insulation in the ceiling and subfloor.

‘‘I think there must be about two feet of insulation in the ceiling, because the new insulation was rolled out over the top of the old insulation.’’ The entire house was doubleglazed, which meant double glazing old windows, including a large set that the couple sourced from a pub in Whanganui – Mark Stephens spent many hours pulling them apart and taking them back to the original timber. All the old character was reintroduced, including fretwork and a veranda. The old timber floors remain, and the high stud, but contemporary fixtures and fittings have equipped it for modern living – along with radiator heating.

It is the contemporary new extension at the rear that is turning heads. Hidden from the road, the new part of the house provides a living room with a built-in timber shelving unit, a high-end kitchen, resort-style covered decking, and a large, self-contained studio for guests that could be an office.

The extension features an entire wall of glass, and the splashback in the kitchen is a single long window looking out to a fernery.

Stephens says he and Nicki did their own landscaping. Creepers cover an old stone wall at the rear of the property, and there is grass, low hedging and small topiary trees.