I lived my entire childhood in one house. My parents bought this house in 1976 and they've lived there ever since for 47 years in the same house. Their approach for finding this house was they looked for the worst one of the South Island of New Zealand; the house was a hideous, vivid blue colour but they painted it white. It was quite a small house, and mum has always said the bathroom in the bottom of the house was the smallest bathroom in New Zealand. There were some features that were very much 1930s Art Deco style, like wooden doors with glazed glass, and the pattern on the door was sort of angled panels of wood, and some of the windows were that kind of typical Art Deco style of curved windows. So downstairs is all Art Deco and then upstairs is more modern. It's on the hillside that overlooks the sea and a bay called Tasman Bay and it's about five minutes’ walk from a beach called Tahunanui. The backyard was mainly lawn with fruit trees, good and steep and it was fun to roll down that, and the front of the house is flat with terraced concrete walls terracing the gardens. Most of the neighbors had been in the area since it was first developed in the 1930s, so a lot of them were older, but they were kind of like substitute grandparents, because I didn't have any grandparents. So that was nice. And so there weren't really kids around. The house has a garden shed and the previous owners said one of the reasons they were selling it was their son used to live in the shed and they weren't happy with that. They thought he was doing something dodgy up there.
My parents had my (twin) sisters 18 years before me. So they had me when they were in their late 40s. When I was a small child, my sisters were leaving home to go to university, so I was essentially brought up as an only child. My parents were really fantastic parents, and I think that's partially because they were older parents. They were very experienced by the time they had me. And they instilled in me good manners and a really good work ethic and to be caring.
I had a small room at the back of the house. I thought it was quite huge and then later on I realized it was smaller. It's an L-shaped room with an old-fashioned wooden window frame, high ceilings, and quite fancy wallpaper. It's a white wallpaper, and it's got stripes, and some of the other stripes are in a flower design like white rose kind of style. It's a little bit 3D. If you brush your hand against the wall, there's a pattern to it, it's not just flat. It was definitely my own realm. I was really interested in animated characters, Wallace and Gromit. I had a Wallace and Gromit bedspread at one point, I had a clock, other things like that. I was also really keen on dinosaurs; I had lots of fossils that I bought and had those out on display. I cleaned my own room, and my mom did some of it as well. And I was totally fine with my parents coming into the room.
My house used to be one story, so it was a lot smaller originally. It was chicken mesh with concrete poured down and then a stucco exterior and then wooden panels and wallpapers, so no actual insulation in the downstairs. And then in the 80s, my parents put a second story on, which meant my sisters, who were in the small room, which I later had, could move into a bigger room. The upstairs was modern construction with insulation so everyone in the winter goes upstairs because it's warmer. In the summer it's quite good and cool but in the winter it's quite cold.
It was a place of refuge. I used to be scared though when I was a child a bit because I thought there was a monster in the downstairs of our house and then upstairs was safe. I'd sometimes race downstairs to get something and race back before the monster could get me.
I had some friends over, but I'd usually go to other people's houses or go to the beach which was quite close by and it was good fun going down to the beach because it's only a five minute walk down the hill and it's a very nice large beach. Half of it is for people and half of it is dog friendly and that was really good to go and play at and there's also playgrounds right behind the beach and a huge set of parks. So plenty to do. There's tennis courts, mini golf playing areas, hydra slides, roller skating, lots of different things. There was a friend at the bottom of the hill, Liam, that I was good friends with and met up with him at the beach quite a lot.
We had years and years of different cats. Dad's in his 70s and he has had about 60 years of cats. And so growing up we had one cat after another. When I was small, someone actually abandoned a cat outside our house, a small kitten, they just drove up, parked nearby, a van dropped this kitten off and then drove off. It was a little male ginger tomcat, and they took that cat in and named it Ginger, so that was the first cat and it was quite a big animal. We had him for five or six years and then after he passed away we went to the SPCA and got a black and white tuxedo cat, a little cat called Kelly, and we had her for quite a long time. And then she passed away eventually, and one of our neighbours' pets suddenly liked to come round and visit all the time, and so we spent quite a lot of time feeding and petting that cat, and we called her Violet, after the Dowager Duchess of Grantham and Downton Abbey, Violet Grantham. We also had chickens, and I also had goldfish and tropical fish. So at one point we had five chickens, a cat, and about 20 fish, all at the same time. The mother Henrietta and all the chicks were Bantam chickens, so smallish chickens. We got lots of eggs from them for a while. And my parents don't have any pets at the moment because they'd like to do some more travelling and they don't want the responsibility of having a pet or putting a cat into a cattery for several months.
Upstairs has the view because all the trees have grown up and blocked the view of the sea. But upstairs there's this huge tree in front of the house which is a London Plain tree and that's about 30 metres tall, it's enormous. It actually had this heritage sign. It was planted in 1905, even before the hillside was developed. And it's just such a huge tree, but gorgeous to look through. And the autumn colors on it. And then at winter, you can look through and see much more sea views, because you look through the skeleton of it. In the summer you see all these birds flying around on the edges of it. It's such a lovely green space to look at. In fact, a park was built all around it. There's lots of big mature trees, lots of bird life, and that's really nice to live with, rather than just feeling you're surrounded by infrastructure and buildings everywhere.
My parents really love this house. I think they're some of the longest standing residents on the hillside now and they say that they'd just like to stay there for their entire lives rather than going into a retirement village which they don't like the sound of. And I would like to own the house someday. I've helped mom and dad redecorate various rooms. I've also done a lot of work on the gardens there, I love the gardening. At the front of the houses I mentioned there was a terrace garden and there was ivy sprawling over a lot of the terraces, so I spent one summer clearing all that ivy and planting out a Mediterranean terrace with citrus trees, lavenders, achillea (yarrow), artichoke, and some bulbs and geraniums, and carnations, and it looked really fantastic. Also down at the back of their garden I've created a whole herbaceous board of dahlias and zinnias and a huge vegetable patch which goes down several terraces, so I feel very invested in the house, and I would like to live there part-time eventually.
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