From Coastal Views to Forever Home: How Nicola and Jason’s Island Bay Lighthouse Inspired Their Dream Build

When Nicola Patrick and her partner Jason Quinn were searching for the perfect site to build a new passive home in Wellington, they stumbled upon a one-of-a-kind property in Island Bay. In buying the section, they also inherited The Lighthouse – a building created by the former owner as an art studio for his wife, then repurposed as an Air BnB. The couple are continuing to rent The Lighthouse out, while they work on building their forever home on this special piece of South Coast paradise.

Can you describe the moment you knew you had found the right home with Tommy’s?

It is a coastal property with the world’s most amazing view and, by Wellington standards, is relatively easy to build on. The site also has access from the street. As we are building a warm, dry passive house to be our place for the next 40 years, we are thinking about when we are older and may not want to drive. The property is in a great location. It’s close to shops, has a flat footpath for a mobility scooter and the bus stop is a five-minute walk.

How has your life changed since purchasing the Lighthouse?

We have fallen in love with the building and want to try to keep it. We’ve just spent the weekend staying and it’s phenomenal. While having it as an Air BnB gives us another income, what we didn’t anticipate is the joy we get from other people staying there. I love their feedback.

What are some of the challenges you face with The Lighthouse?

The building has a high-risk of leaky building syndrome. As a result, we struggled to get traditional mortgage finance and have remortgaged the two houses we already own to have the best chance at building our dream.

My partner Jason and I bought the property knowing all of this. Jason is New Zealand’s leading expert on passive houses, building them for others through his business Sustainable Engineering. As a result, he’s very familiar with the challenges of building.

What we didn’t anticipate (until we went to pull up the carpet) is that parts of the floor in The Lighthouse have been badly affected. At some point, we have to be realistic about the maintenance and repair that goes with this and sadly, we don’t know whether it will be sensible to keep the building.

Why is this property the right site to build your forever home?

Jason owns the house we live in and it is in the next bay over from The Lighthouse so we are familiar with this area. We had been thinking about building behind it, up a steep section, especially as one of our lovely neighbours has already built a passive house next door so we knew it could work. But we realised that an ocean view was calling to us so when The Lighthouse came up, we thought we would try and were successful. The section has another challenge with a sewage pipe running through the middle so we are planning for a narrow footprint and building into the rock – lots of steps to go though!

Can you share a special memory or milestone about your buying process?

We often go swimming in Princess Bay and you get a view back across a couple of bays – you can see The Lighthouse in the distance.

When we submitted our tender, we actually included a photo of us floating in the ocean with The Lighthouse in the background, explaining to the vendor that we wanted this site to be the place for our forever home.

What was the most memorable part of your home-buying journey?

David Vaughan, our agent from Tommy’s, was lovely to deal with – he was prompt and very responsive.

We found David to be helpful in our negotiations with the vendor Bruce. While we pushed ourselves as hard as we could, offering $15,000 more than we’d budgeted for, we still couldn’t quite afford the price. That’s when Bruce decided to support us in buying the house by leaving some money in the property and we are paying him back.

What made you choose Tommy’s over other estate agencies?

I’d already bought and sold with Tommy’s with my first house purchase in Wellington in the early 2000s and I have a friend, Glenn Stewart, who works there as an agent so I was stoked that this listing was with them.

In what ways has your new home positively impacted your life?

We are just starting to chip away at our planning and hope to be living in our new house within two years. We plan to share our build journey as a case study to show people how to develop a more modest and simple passive house. And we get to enjoy it on the occasional weekend it is not already booked, which is such a treat.