With a preference for character homes, Gail Lourie and Rupert Bird were prepared to wait to find something special for their weekday home in Tauranga.
Rupert was commuting four-and-a-half hours each Sunday and Friday between Tauranga and home in Rangitikei. After three years of living in hotel rooms, he and Gail looked for a more permanent base.
They bought this kauri cottage, a converted schoolhouse that had started its life in the early 1900s in Maramarua.
Former owner Billie Kay, in her 70s when she lived here and by all accounts a colourful character, bid on the building at an auction in 1995 and it was shifted in six pieces on to this north-facing 3308sq m section — surrounded by bush, but just five-minutes' drive from Tauranga's city centre.
After Billie's death last year, "we purchased it thinking we were going to freshen it up", says Gail.
"I don't want to take any credit for Billie's creativity," she says. "She was well travelled and maybe that inspired her. She wanted a lock-up-and leave and this really is. It takes five minutes to mow the lawns."
Colours of the garden's plentiful agapanthus are repeated in detail such as the window frames.
"And to put the dinghy up in the ceiling. She had incredible taste," says Gail.
What was the classroom is now the open-plan living and rimu kitchen, with French doors out to the veranda, surrounded by puriri and serenaded by birdlife. Inside, old railway carriage doors, with one opening to the wardrobe and another to the bathroom, add a quirky touch.
Ceilings are high, windows plentiful, flooring is matai. And for anyone of a certain age who has memories of chilly wintry school mornings with only a small fire for heat, those recollections are banished quickly by the heat pump in this well-insulated home.
Gail and Rupert have painted the bedroom grey and added white in the tiled bathroom where there is an elegant claw-foot bath and the handbasin sits atop a Singer sewing table.
The home is positioned on the side of a hill with the garage and laundry underneath the veranda.
The house is hidden from the road and reached by a driveway lined with pittosporums. Gail says the location is what makes this property special.
"You don't feel like you are in Tauranga. It is quiet, and the birdlife is amazing," she says.
"And it is easy care. You feel like you are on holiday when you're here. And socially it has a large living area that is great for entertaining. We have done a wee bit of entertaining but we aren't here at the weekends.
"We were thinking of moving up here completely, but things have changed in the past few months. We have found another large project and have moved back down to Rangitikei.
"This would be a delightful place to live because you have no neighbours.
"The veranda pokes out into a puriri tree. And, because you have a reserve on both sides, you have tui, rosellas and pukeko.
"You feel like you are in the middle of the bush, but you are five minutes from the city of Tauranga on almost three quarters of an acre. It could be a bush bach."
