Client Journey: Chelsea & Simon’s whare

Kaiapoi, Waimakariri — Toroa XL, three bedrooms

The home was never the hard part. The hard part was a paper road, a district plan, and a set of rules almost nobody knows how to read.

Who Chelsea and Simon are

Chelsea wrote to us in March 2025 with a very ordinary question: did we have anything in Christchurch they could walk through? She and Simon were thinking about a tiny home "in the next year or so" and liked our designs.

They had one significant advantage. The land was family land — her parents' property at Kaiapoi — so they were not competing for a section on the open market. What they had instead was a set of planning rules to get through, and no idea yet how deep that would go.

What they decided

Their first plan was a tiny home plus a separate pod alongside it for Simon.

In June they changed their minds, and the reasoning was good enough that we now repeat it to other clients. A three-bedroom Toroa XL puts that extra room on the ground floor, inside the house. It is warmer. The power is simpler. And nobody is out in a separate structure on their own.

One home instead of two. Cheaper, better, and everyone under the same roof.

They also did their homework properly. They walked through another builder's show home to compare, came back to us, and asked pointed questions about walkway height and headroom upstairs — because in the other home Simon's head touched the ceiling. We answered with numbers. They checked those numbers themselves.

The council

This is the part of the story worth reading.

The site sits under the Waimakariri district plan, and the applicable rules turned on whether the occupants are descendants of Kemp's Deed. Chelsea is. So is her mother, who owns the property. That mattered, and it took several rounds with the council's duty planner to establish exactly which provisions applied — minimum site area, minor dwelling size, the thirty-metre rule measuring habitable wall to habitable wall, site coverage, setbacks, recession planes, height limits, water connection and floor level policy.

Then a paper road turned up across the site.

At that point most people stall, because a paper road is the kind of thing that makes a bank nervous and a buyer give up. We went to the council's roading team directly and asked them to look at it. They came back supportive and proposed a placement area — which they were under no obligation to do.

"Oh my gosh yes, Fran you are amazing! Thank you so much! It's been such a relief to finally have someone on side who knows the game :D That site suits us :D" — Chelsea, July 2025

That was 3 July. They signed with us ten days later.

The build, and the concrete they poured themselves

Chelsea is a details person, and her home is better for it. Over three months of design she worked through floor plans, a window schedule, custom slats and balustrade, custom stairs, a built-in couch, a desk for her study, and paint selections. She asked good questions relentlessly and apologised for it constantly, which was never necessary.

Meanwhile they prepared their own site. Twelve foundation touch points, poured by hand, in batches.

"Just thought I'd share some pics from our end — we laid the concrete for three of the twelve foundation touch points today :)"

Their Toroa XL was built through the spring and summer, delivered to Kaiapoi at the beginning of February 2026, and handed over that month.

Where it is at

They are in, on family land, with the dogs — who get up and down the custom stairs on a yoga mat, which Chelsea reports works extremely well and which we now mention to every dog owner who asks.

Their home went out in one of our newsletters not long after and got more attention than anything we have ever posted.

What this taught Ruru

Two things, and the second one is on us.

The first: the consent question is the job. Chelsea and Simon owned their site outright and still spent four months establishing what they were allowed to build on it. If we had only sold them a house, they would have had a house and nowhere legal to put it. Reading a district plan, writing to a duty planner and going back to a roading team about a paper road is not a side service. For a lot of clients it is the actual product.

The second: when their home went viral, we called it Chelsea's home, because Chelsea is who we had emailed for a year. Chelsea wrote back and asked us to add Simon's name.

She was right. They built it together, and she had to ask. We fixed the post, and we now write both names on everything — because a home belongs to everyone who lives in it, not just to whoever answers the emails.

Got land but no idea what you are allowed to put on it? That is the question to bring us first.