Auckland is full of beautiful old villas owned by people who don't actually want to live like it's 1910. That, more or less, is the whole job. Keep what makes the house worth having, and quietly bring the rest into this century.
I've been renovating these houses since the seventies, so I've watched a lot of owners fall into the same trap. They love the villa for its character, then set about stripping out the very things that gave it character in the first place. The trick is knowing what to leave alone.
Work out what's worth keeping
The soul of a villa lives at the front. The hallway, the sash windows, the ceiling roses and scotia, the leadlight above the door. That's the part that stops you on the footpath, and it's almost always the part I leave well alone. You can't fake a hundred years of proportion. If someone's torn it out, you can put it back, but it never quite sings the way the original did.
The back of the house is a different story. That's usually where the original plan fights you: a string of small dark rooms, a kitchen tacked on as an afterthought, a bathroom someone added in the 1970s and never loved. That's where the work goes, and where you can be genuinely bold.
Keep the front honest. Open up the back. Most good villa renovations are some version of that one sentence.
The council rules are real, and they're not the enemy
If your villa sits in a Special Character or heritage overlay, and a great many of them in Remuera, Ponsonby and Grey Lynn do, you can't simply start knocking things down. The council cares a great deal about what the street sees: the front facade, the roofline, the windows, often the chimneys. Changes there need consent, and that takes planning.
People hear this and panic. They shouldn't. In my experience it's all manageable, as long as it's planned for at the start rather than discovered halfway through a demolition. The expensive mistakes happen when someone does unconsented work and has to undo it, or when a buyer's lawyer finds a missing code compliance certificate years later. Get the paperwork right and it protects the value of the house, not just your weekends.
This is the part where having someone who manages the whole project earns its keep. I've spent decades working alongside the same engineers, builders and council officers. Knowing how the process actually runs, and who to call, takes most of the stress out of it.
Where old meets new is where it's won or lost
The hardest part of a villa renovation isn't the demolition or the new kitchen. It's the join. The moment where the original 1905 hallway meets the new open-plan living you've added at the back. Get the ceiling heights, the floor levels and the trim profiles right, and you walk through without noticing the seam. Get them wrong and it's the only thing you'll ever see.
That's the bit I obsess over. A villa should feel like one house that grew gracefully, not an old house with a modern box stapled to the rear.
If I could give you one piece of advice
Spend your money where your hands and eyes land every day. The tapware you touch each morning. The light in the room you sit in at night. The storage that decides whether the house feels calm or cluttered. People blow their budget on things they'll barely register and then economise on the details they live with. After fifty years I'd say it's almost always the other way round.