Priced out of the market, architect designs and builds own home

Thursday, 25 June 2026

When architect Sharlene Browning and family came home to New Zealand after 10 years in Brisbane, she started to house hunt but was shocked at the “ridiculous cost and process” to get on the property ladder here.

“We tried to navigate the post-EQC Christchurch housing market, which then became the Covid housing market. We were really struggling to get a deposit.”

With two young children, Browning wasn’t working fulltime, and they were looking at homes to buy using the 5% low-deposit scheme, but she says everything they looked at had issues with deferred maintenance, meaning the banks wouldn’t finance them.

“The whole system is a problem,” Browning says. “I was getting told you need to lower your daycare costs and increase your income. Or that you need to borrow from the bank of Mum and Dad.”

Living in “small, crappy rentals”, she says they eventually gave up on buying an existing home in Christchurch, looked south, and decided to build new on a small 316m² section in Cromwell.

Naturally, Browning designed the home herself, and it became a total family effort with her brother, builder Kyle Anderson taking the reins.

She’s very grateful to her brother, who she says not only managed the build despite previously having a “bloody architects” mentality, but also lived with the family in a cold 90m² rental throughout the build.

He made such good connections in the area during his time there that he was asked to be Santa at the local Placemakers Christmas party.

“What people would expect to tear us apart, brought us closer together,” Browning says, “enriching our understanding and respect for each other and our chosen professions, and each of our paths forward.”

The resulting four-bedroom home has a modest 147m² footprint - but clever design ensures that expands to 195m² of total usable area, with an office and playroom upstairs.

To make the most of the small site and budget, Browning says she “focused on bringing daylight and ventilation into the house so it felt light and airy”.

“The first thing people say when they come in is ‘Oh my gosh, this place is so much bigger than I thought.’ That’s just my play with volume. Attic trusses everywhere mean there are spaces within spaces.”

The project won in the small projects category of last month’s NZIA Te Kāhui Whaihanga 2026 Southern regional architectural awards, with the jury praising its “efficient and well organised” planning “creating a strong sense of generosity through natural light, proportion and connection to outdoor space”.

“On a tightly constrained urban site, light-filled and highly liveable spaces are carefully balanced with practical work-from-home areas,” the jury’s citation reads.

Browning incorporated a central courtyard and Velux skylights to open the home up. Covenants on the subdivision meant the living had to be south-facing to face the greenway, so the courtyard was essential for privacy.

She says they bought a small section to fit their budget, and the staged process of buying land and building meant it was better for her to return to work fulltime to help earn the sums required.

She has been working for the past three years on the Oaks Queenstown Shores Resort remediation project, one of New Zealand’s largest leaky building repair projects.

The family is totally happy with their move to Central Otago.

“We love the outdoors, and a slower pace of life,“ Browning says. ”Cromwell is growing rapidly in a good way, and there’s a lot happening in Central.

“In summer, the kids are at the lake every single day; we go down with the dog after school. And then we’re trying to get the kids into walks. And they go skiing with school. There’s ice skating and curling in Alex[andra]…“

And while she says their home has become something stable that brings them joy, they have nonetheless tentatively put it on the market.

“We’re kind of excited about the prospect of another project. It’s just speculatively on the market to see what we could get for it. We’re not in a hurry to sell because we do love it here.

“It’s nice to be living in the fruits of your labour, and it was a lot of labour.”