Logan Apartments

Greenwoods Corner is one of Epsom’s original neighbourhood centres. Shops, cafes, a genuine village pattern, and Manukau Road carrying people to the city one way and Onehunga the other. The suburb was established long before this building went up and will be established long after. That permanence is what we look for in a site, and it comes at a price: a constrained corner in a settled suburb leaves no slack. Every metre of the plan was thought through.

A site like this punishes lazy design. It also rewards the opposite, which is the trade we prefer to make.

The one advantage a tight corner can offer is up. The Logan rises past the tree line that defines this stretch of Epsom, so the upper homes look out to the Sky Tower, to the One Tree Hill obelisk on Maungakiekie, and west across the Manukau Harbour. Those outlooks do not exist at street level and cannot be added later. Lifting the living spaces above the canopy was the decision that shaped everything else in the building.

Inside, the mix runs from one-bedroom apartments to three-bedroom homes, each drawn and specified individually. The working principle was simple: the detail has to hold up long after the keys are handed over, because these were designed as homes for owners, not stock for a spreadsheet.

Parking is where tight inner-suburb projects usually give up something that matters: too few spaces, or a ramped basement that swallows the budget and half the floor plate. Neither was acceptable here.

The answer was an automated car-stacker system serving all fifty-two carparks from a single ground-floor entry. A car-stacker is harder to design, consent, survey and commission than a conventional apartment garage, and it was the right call anyway. It let the building keep its full apartment count and real parking on a footprint that could not hold both any other way.

Delivering carparking at all was a choice we actively made. Sitting on a transport corridor, the building wasn’t required to provide it. But we knew parking is a big part of whether a building actually works for the people living in it.

The Logan was delivered through the post-2020 construction period, when material costs, supply chains and labour turned against every project in the country and plenty of them stalled or fell over. Ours did not. A small team held the specification and the standard the whole way through, and the building was completed in December 2023.

Anyone can promise; the period from 2020 to 2023 sorted developers who finish from developers who talk.

Every apartment at The Logan found an owner. The design made it through consenting intact, the building was funded and finished, and the homes were bought by people who live in them.

The building stands at 572 Manukau Road.