Auckland's early homes were mostly cottages built of lapped horizontal weatherboards. While working-class Aucklanders lived in small cottages, of two to four rooms with a skillion (lean-to), villas were the homes of the middle class.
"The most expensive villas became increasingly elaborate; some had angled bays with hipped roofs, lengthy covered verandas with possibly fretwork adornment, and perhaps, though more rarely, roofs of imported slate," Stone wrote. By the 1870s, galvanised iron replaced the fire-hazard wooden shingles on roofs.
Suburban Auckland was beginning to take shape.
Onehunga, then a thriving port on the Manukau Harbour, was the largest of the city's outposts, plumped up with retired British soldiers who'd migrated as Fencibles to form a defence against possible Maori attack. The township of Howick was established in 1874 by Fencibles given a cottage and an acre of land as payment for seven years' service.
Transport opened up new neighbourhoods to the north, south and west. The Devonport Steam Ferry's regular services across the Waitemata in the 1880s gave birth to the daily working commute from the North Shore to the city. Rail lines to Onehunga, Helensville and the Waikato encouraged the growth of settlements along the routes, like Otahuhu, Papakura and Henderson.
The Kiwi romance with owning your own single-detached home at the front of a grassed quarter-acre section was already in full bloom.
After World War I, Californian bungalows - low-slung, two to three-bedroom homes with deep porches and bay windows - answered the demand for more middle and lower income housing in suburbs along the electric tram lines, such as Mt Eden and Balmoral. Pockets of Spanish Mission and Art Deco homes sprang up in the new suburbs of the 1930s.
It was the state house that made one of the most indelible marks on Auckland's housing landscape. As the inner city became run-down at the turn of the century, better-off families moved to established communities in Remuera and Epsom and new suburbs such as Mt Albert. The poor remained - and the run-down workers' cottages and boarding houses behind the sawmills and shipyards of Freeman's Bay became the city's embarrassing slums.
Such squalid living conditions, coupled with extortionate rents, led to government intervention. Premier Richard Seddon's attempt to build houses to rent to working families in the 1900s failed to fire, but by the late 1930s, on the back of an urban housing shortage, state housing areas began sprouting up across Auckland.
A model estate of more than 2000 stand-alone houses was built in Orakei. Urban legend has it the first home in Coates Ave was handed over to young unionist (later politician) Tom Skinner, Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage helping to haul his furniture. However, the Herald reported on December 11, 1937, that the first tenants to move in were YMCA physical drill instructor J.C. Bonham, his wife and two children, who slipped into their four-bedroom home "practically unnoticed".
Inner-city blocks of flats opened in Symonds St and Greys Ave in the late 1940s and, in South Auckland, a large block of farmland was transformed into a state housing development in Otara, drawing urban Maori and Pacific immigrants; it was later criticised for a lack of community facilities. That was a common grievance through the 50s and 60s as sprawling new suburbs rapidly emerged but were undersupplied with basic amenities of footpaths, street lights, community centres and libraries.
Aucklanders' reliance on cars and the construction of the city's motorway networks saw it become one of the most dispersed cities in the world. State-subsidised mortgages meant more families could buy their quarter-acre dream.
In the years leading up to the opening of the Auckland Harbour Bridge in 1959, thousands began buying homes on the North Shore in anticipation of the steel connection to the city's heart. Building companies such as Fletchers and Neil Homes added thousands of low-cost houses to the once-rural landscapes of Pakuranga and the Te Atatu Peninsula.
As the problems of urban sprawl - like traffic snarl-ups and infrastructure shortfalls - weighed heavily on Auckland's planners, new kinds of infill housing emerged. While the "sausage flats" of the 1960s - links of single-storeyed flats on cross-leased sections sharing driveways - weren't well-received, townhouses built on subdivided sections were more successful.
The CBD went through a revival in the late 1980s - through more job opportunities and the rising cost of stand-alone homes - and the demand for high-rise apartments grew, and continues to grow.
By 2009, Auckland had 17,500 apartments; today there are 26,500 apartments in 393 buildings across the city, says commercial real estate agency CBRE.
The upsurge of apartment life has not been completely at the expense of history, however. In fact, on the slopes of gentrified Freeman's Bay, some of those Victorian workmen's cottages once sentenced as slums have been restored and revamped; 1880s wooden houses on as little as 250sq m of land are now valued around $1.2 million.
Auckland's history paid off for some.