What’s not to like about the concept of co-housing? You get to choose your neighbours, create your spaces and engage a cool, up-and-coming practice to design your dream. Even better, your new home is likely to be considerably more affordable than a single dwelling would be, once the site and build costs have been divvied up.

Buckley Road’s new Block Party by Spacecraft is a lesson in co-housing done well. Here, in Wellington’s Southgate, four two-bedroom terraced houses sit together like Tetris blocks, with an indent at both the north-eastern and south-western corners to ensure the two central dwellings enjoy plenty of light.

Economical materials have been used throughout: a concrete slab and blocks at ground-floor level offer passive solar heat storage and thermal performance and, one floor up, plywood runs through the centre of the plan to delineate dining from kitchen and living. Rustic macrocarpa floorboards are left exposed below, forming a natural, warm ceiling to the bedrooms.

The four kitchens, worked through as a group alongside architects Caro Robertson, Tim Gittos and Jesse Matthews, all share the same configuration but individual preferences come into play on the cabinet faces. Gittos says the home-owners also went to town on the interior colour selections — an economical way to ensure variation between the dwellings — and the bathrooms saw varying amounts spent on lighting and plumbing fittings and tiles.

An attic space with raked ceiling runs along all four houses, which are connected by two major gable forms. With an oversized, opening skylight, this space is used either as an office or a bedroom – a full third bedroom was removed from the original plans to reduce cost.

All of the dwellings sit along the site’s northern boundary and are well insulated, with high-performance glass throughout and an energy-recovery ventilation system resulting in low heating loads. And this is where the story has a happy ending.

Here, on a 600m² site bordering a park are four homes, which came in at roughly $600K each to build, including a shared, enclosed common space with sea views on the western roadside boundary and a terraced area to the east offering a similar outlook. Gittos describes these homes well — he calls them “equitably good” — which sounds pretty good to us.

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