In 2019 we decided to look to run a Bed an Breakfast as Anna’s “retirement” plan. We had stayed in a Bed and Breakfast in Te Horo where the guest rooms were detached from the main house, but not including kitchens and liked the idea of guests having their own space and privacy while still having some interactions with them over breakfast. While thinking about where would be good to have our B&B, we felt that South Wairarapa was a thriving area that could do with some more accommodation and has year round things for guests to do.
We looked at many already built houses and plenty of pieces of land and decided on a piece of land 7 minutes from the centre of Greytown right near the Railway and on the bike tracks. We asked around for recommendations for Architects and interviewed a few. We decided to go with Holmes Architecture and embarked on a design journey.Mike and the team at Holmes Architecture were great to work with and came up with a great design.
The spec for the design was to use passive house principles while also having lots of indoor/outdoor flow. We didn’t necessarily want to go to the complexities of full passive house certification, but a lot of the principles that they deliver were what we wanted – a house built not to need heating or cooling; a house with good dry airflow. We decided to design for a high Homestar rating and for accessibility as these all seemed to be just good things to be doing, so as we were looking to run a B&B these would be good to have as part of our offering.
We decided early on to also get the landscape design done by Jamie Reid Garden and Landscape Design since we had a large area that was currently just a paddock. Doing the landscape at the time when the house design was still on paper was great as in order to make the most out of the land Jamie needed the house in a different part of the property – all very easy when still at design stage.
Our first quote for the build was a shock – it was a lot more than the Quantity Surveyor had estimated and there was no information available as to why. Along came the first COVID lockdown and a small amount of re-thinking to try to cut down the costs with a small amount of redesign. A second attempt at getting builders interested and quotes came in much more like what the Quantity Surveyor had said and so we were off.
The builders that we selected were Maple Build who are based in Featherston. Zac and his team were wonderful to work with and along the way made some good suggestions to improve the build. Building started in January 2021 and even though we were primarily using as environmentally friendly building materials as we could find that were sourced from New Zealand, due to COVID and lockdowns there were delays and slow downs. The builders were great at hearing about cost increases that were coming and ordering in advance of these to prevent cost blow outs. We spent the next nearly two years coming up from Wellington to Greytown for fortnightly meetings with the builders and the architect to ensure that things were on track and there were no issues that needed sorting out.
In October 2022 the main part of the house was complete and we were able to move in, the B&B rooms completed shortly after that in January 2023. We opened the B&B in March 2023.
During the rest of 2023 we put together the final documentation and went through the Homestar Auditing processes. In December 2023 we were awarded a 9 Homestar Rating. We scored 94.3 out of 100. This shows that our house is built with sustainable products, minimised waste during the build, is built with sustainable living in mind and is a comfortable, maintainable house for now and in the future.
Now we have the fun of progressing the landscape design, learnings what fruit and vegetables grow best, and increasing our B&B occupancy.