Sometimes you just know when you've found the right place. And even if it takes you months and months to get there, the results are worth it. That's certainly what happened to Angela King and Andrew Honore when they bought their Mangere Bridge home more than six years ago.
"We'd brought our toddler out to feed the animals at Ambury Farm, and drove past the open-home sign, so were just killing time to look at it," says Angela. "But we walked in and went, 'Oh my, look at this -- the 50s house, the full-quarter acre section'. We just couldn't get it out of our heads."
At that point the family were living in Onehunga, but had loved visiting friends in Mangere Bridge and were keen to move into the neighbourhood that seemed from another time. They watched the house sit empty for months, so eventually approached the owners and plugged on through complicated negotiations with family trusts, before becoming only the second family to live there.
The house was built after the original Barrow family subdivided the big estate for one of their sons in the late 1950s. The grand Victorian house, rebuilt after a fire, is still their neighbour and the two families share a blurry boundary of lawns and shrubs, with kids running back and forth.
The cool split-level was added some time in the late 1960s as the family grew, with a fourth master bedroom at one end and a sunny open living room at the other, both step down from the main house. By the time Andrew and Angela, now pregnant with their second son, moved in, it was still very much carved into rooms in the old style -- the kitchen on the darkest side of the building, cut off from the living spaces, the bathroom pretty original -- but the couple could see with a few adjustments how perfectly it would work for them. With their collection of great mid-century furniture and eye for clever styling, Angela and Andrew were in their element.
Image 1 of 6: The quarter-acre paradise does still exist and this one has been beautifully renovated. Photos / Fiona Goodall, Getty Images
Because they planned this to be their forever house, the renovations were exacting. They added insulation to ceilings and floors, installing a DVS system, but retaining the cool brick fireplace, with its feature wall and wide hearth for seating. Angela is allergic to mould, so the master bedroom got extra insulation and double glazing, to make it toasty dry and warm. The original well-proportioned joinery remains in the rest of the house, a wall of glass and french doors flooding light into the cork-floored living room.
They opened up the kitchen and dining room, swapping them so that the kitchen is at the front of the house and adding slit windows. Now the adults can keep an eye on the kids on the front lawn and the street. It's still one of those places where children play basketball on the road, and the huge tree on the front lawn is considered everybody's playground.
The open lawns are just as they'd dreamed, and even the adults are roped in for street croquet and cricket parties (whites, cucumber sandwiches, of course). Around the back there are raised vegetable beds (they did keep chickens for a while) and a covered carport for bikes and games on a rainy day. The family still visit Ambury, ride their bikes around the foreshore, and love being exactly at the halfway point between the beach and Mangere mountain. The neighbourhood turned out better than they'd imagined.
The couple designed the cool plywood kitchen, complete with island bench, with joiners from The Kitchen Place, lugging home slim stainless steel handles from Ikea in Australia. They inserted an opening sky light to bring light into the dining room, and upgraded the bathroom with more clever plywood.
The old-school laundry is a treat -- Angela got the mud-room benches and hooks to take all the boys' boots and school bags, Andrew a cute peg-board tool bench. They extended their plywood theme to a feature wall in one of the boys' bedrooms, but left the original built-in joinery and storage.
Their next project was to be knocking through to create a master en suite, but that can be the next owners' project as the family are selling to head off on new adventures. After they have backpacked around India and Europe with the boys for a year they plan to settle in a country town. Their Kiwi idyll is perfect for another family -- with all the convenience of a job well done.
