Heritage villas and character homes across Mount Victoria.
Aerial Assess covers the whole of Mount Victoria, from the character streets that climb toward the Town Belt back down to the flatter blocks near Courtenay Place and Kent Terrace. We look over what we can see and safely reach, and set our findings down in a written letter. Where a roof is too steep, too high or too fragile to reach safely from the ground, we bring the detail back with a drone from the air.
Mount Victoria is one of the most heritage-heavy suburbs in Wellington. A lot of the housing stock dates from the 1880s to the 1920s, and the roofs reflect that: complex multi-pitch designs, dormers, multiple chimneys, decorative ridge tiles, and original lead, zinc or galvanised flashings. Some have been carefully maintained for decades; others carry layers of patch repairs no one ever wrote down, and both are common.
Years of Wellington roofs have put us across just about every system the city built with: terracotta and slate, original galvanised and long-run steel, lead and zinc flashings, and the membrane sections tucked over later additions. In Mount Victoria that range earns its keep. A single villa can carry its original roof alongside patch repairs laid down across several decades, and working out what is actually up there, then reading how each of those systems tends to fail, is usually most of the job.
What we typically find on Mount Victoria roofs
- Aged ridge cap pointing on the original tile roofs, particularly where mortar work hasn't been redone since the home was built.
- Lead and zinc flashing fatigue around the multiple chimneys typical of Mt Vic villas. A lot of the original lead work is well past its useful life.
- Slipped or cracked tiles on terracotta and concrete tile roofs after wind events.
- Decorative ridge tile damage, especially on character homes with ornamental cresting or ridge details.
- Valley flashing wear on multi-pitch roofs where two slopes meet, sometimes the most leak-prone detail on a Mt Vic villa.
- Aged underlay on roofs that haven't been re-roofed, visible from inside the roof space.
- Repair patchwork from multiple eras (a 1970s patch over an original detail, a 2000s repair on top of that) that doesn't always behave the way you'd expect.
Why Mt Vic building reports rarely cover the roof: the tight, steep streets running up to the Town Belt leave little room to stand a ladder or get a clear line on the upper roof, and the steep pitches, stacked roof planes and fragile original tile only make safe access harder. So it is common for a Mt Vic building report to note "the roof was not accessed" or to recommend "a qualified roofer assess the roof separately". That separate roofer's assessment is the part we handle.