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New build

MoStreet

A new house framed on a platform above the coast

Category
New build
Built by
Topp Shelf Building

06New builds

  1. The platform

    The house stands on a bench cut into a coastal hillside, with a timber pole wall holding the high side and scaffold ringing the drop on the low one. The slab was poured across the full footprint before anything went vertical, and the prefabricated wall and floor frames were delivered and stacked flat on it, ready to be stood in order.

  2. Standing the walls

    The frames go up off the slab and are plumbed and braced as they go, so the plan of the house is readable at full size long before anything encloses it. On a site this exposed the edge protection goes up with them rather than after them — the scaffold in these frames is standing before the first wall is.

  3. The roof

    The trusses came in strapped packs, craned over the framed floor rather than carried up through it, then set out along the top plates, fixed and braced back to one another. The safety net went in underneath before anyone worked above it. With the roof structure standing, the shape of the house is settled and it is ready to be closed in.

  4. Where it stands

    This is the job as photographed: framed, trussed and braced, and not yet clad, roofed or lined. It is on the site as work in progress rather than as a finished house, and the rest of the record follows when the rest of the build does.

Project details
The roof trusses standing over the framed house — two runs meeting along a valley, safety netting strung between the bottom chords, and the sea filling the gap under a clear sky.

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Projects we think you’ll like also

12 Prestwich Rise — the home Clinton designed and built for his own family, street elevation at dusk.

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A six-bedroom family home stepped into a hillside

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Foxham — the finished home from the street corner at dusk, the red front door and the garage lit from above under a deep blue sky.

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Foxham

A house for eight, held to three hundred square metres

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Ōtaki Gardens — the finished showhome from the driveway, its dark vertical cladding and pale brick entry portico under a mono-pitch roof.

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Ōtaki Gardens

A three-bedroom showhome framed, closed in and clad

Ōtaki Gardens, Ōtaki

The end of the woolshed from the paddock — the timber loading platform and its steps standing off the corrugated wall, a boulder at the foot of them, and the hill country running away to the ranges beyond.

Rural work

Taumarunui Woolshed

A woolshed rebuilt around the way the stock moves

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Ollie's Deck — the finished kwila deck from the lawn, running the length of the green board-and-batten wall under the veranda roof, its boxed edge in low sun.

Features

Ollie's Deck

A kwila deck built along a covered side of a house

Built from bare ground — substructure, kwila decking and boxed edge

The kwila deck off the guest quarters — a glass and white balustrade around it, a cast table and two chairs in the sun, the lawn below and the sea beyond the trees.

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Manly Street

Guest quarters above a new double garage

Paraparaumu, Kāpiti Coast

FAQ

Questions
Before you enquire

Answers to the most common questions we get before a project begins. The full set — pricing, timelines, changes, consent and more — lives on the common questions page.

  • It depends on the scope of the work and the site — some work needs consent, some is exempt, and the thresholds change, so we'd rather look at your actual job than hand you a generic rule.

    Where consent is needed, we handle the application and the council process as part of the job, while being straight about one thing: the consent legally belongs to the property owner, and the council's clock — 20 working days on a complete application — is the council's. We'll tell you honestly at the start what your project is likely to involve.

    How we handle consent

  • Duration depends on scope and, where it applies, consent — councils have a statutory 20-working-day clock on complete applications, and a request for more information stops that clock. We give a real timeframe when we quote, not a generalisation here.

    On staying with it: we run one main project at a time. Once your job starts, it is the job — you see consistent progress, not weeks of empty site while the builder is somewhere else. Rachel, who named timeframes as her worry before her own project, describes being kept informed throughout and the process as transparent and upfront.

  • Topp Shelf is owner-led: Clinton prices the job and builds it, with his apprentice and a small set of regular trades he has worked with for years.

    When a trade is on site — plumbing, electrical — Clinton remains the one responsible to you. You deal with the builder who carries the job from the first conversation to the last day on site.

    More about how the business works

  • We're a Kāpiti-based building company working across Horowhenua, the Kāpiti Coast, Porirua, the Hutt Valley and Wellington City.

    How far we'll travel depends on the job — rural builds travel further than small repairs — and the callback settles it in one conversation.