Fretwork carved by hand under a verandah, a bargeboard nobody makes anymore, and four or five generations of paint stacked on a single sash window by the time we scrape back to bare timber. Villas and bungalows hand us more history than any other house we work on, and every layer of it changes how we approach the job.
Villas went up mostly between 1880 and 1910, with a steep gable roof, ornamental detailing, and a deep verandah running the full width of the front. Bungalows followed from around 1910 through to the 1940s, and they simplified almost everything a villa did. The roof pitch drops to something lower and more horizontal, the verandah shrinks or gets partly enclosed, and the decorative fretwork and turned posts that a villa carries get toned down or dropped altogether.
A few things we check before we even quote:
None of that changes the painting process on its own, but it tells us how much decorative surface area we’re dealing with and how careful the prep has to be around it.
Kauri and rimu are dense compared to the radiata pine used in most modern weatherboard. They take a first coat of primer more slowly, and a century of built up paint layers on top of that density means we’re often dealing with film thickness a modern house never accumulates. That thickness is exactly what starts to crack, lift and alligator on the oldest villas, and it’s why a straightforward repaint sometimes turns into a proper strip back once we’re up close.
Verandah posts, finials and bargeboards catch this worse than flat wall boards, because the paint pools in every carved groove and takes longer to fail evenly across the detail. We treat those elements as their own smaller job within the wider exterior painting work, since rushing them tends to show.
Anything built before 1940 should be treated as almost certain to have lead based paint somewhere in its history, well past the general 1980s cutoff that applies to newer housing. We don’t dry sand any surface where that’s a possibility, since that throws lead dust straight into the air of an occupied house. Wet sanding and careful scraping are the safer manual methods, and where the layers run deep we bring in HEPA sanders with proper dust extraction instead of guessing.
If your villa has had bathroom or kitchen relining done at some point, there’s also a chance of asbestos in materials used before the 1990s. We don’t sand or disturb anything that might contain it, and where testing confirms it we bring in certified asbestos removers rather than touching it ourselves. Between the two, it’s worth reading through removing lead paint safely in your home before any scraping starts on a house this age, since the safe handling steps carry real weight on a villa in a way they simply don’t on something built in the last thirty years.
Most villas and bungalows were originally painted in a simple three colour scheme: a lighter body colour, a darker trim, and a third shade for the sashes and front door that stood apart from both. That structure still works today and it’s usually what suits the house best, even with a completely modern palette sitting inside it.
If your home sits in one of Auckland’s special character areas, repainting in a heritage appropriate colour scheme generally doesn’t need council sign off. A dramatic departure from the original palette is the one situation worth a quick check with council first, particularly if the street has a strong, consistent look to it already.
Rot behind fretwork and around verandah post bases is common, since those spots trap water longer than a flat wall ever does. Cracked or bowed weatherboards from a century of movement need replacing rather than filling. And where the interior ceiling roses or cornices are original lath and plaster rather than plasterboard, any damage there is a job for plasterboard fixings in Auckland before paint goes anywhere near it, since a patch over failing lath never holds.
Villas and bungalows usually get painted inside and out around the same time, if only because the two sides of the house tend to show their age together. If you’re weighing up doing both, we treat the surface prep on interior painting in Auckland as its own conversation, running on a separate timeline to the exterior work regardless of what season you start in.
A villa or bungalow rewards a painter who’s worked on one before and costs you if it gets one who hasn’t. If you’ve got a character home in Auckland that needs its exterior brought back, get in touch with our team and we’ll walk the place with you before anything gets touched.
