SCHOOL ZONES:
Campbells Bay & Mairangi Bay primaries, Rangitoto College, Westlake Boys and Girls high schools.
CONTACT:
Carole Thomas, Premium, 021 539 553.
Karen Chambers has had a lot to do in just four weeks -- including putting her dream home up for sale.
You can tell that hurts, but Karen is off to join husband Dave in Sydney for, well, she thinks it could be up to 10 years. Dave works for Progressive Enterprises and was in charge of all the Countdown supermarkets in New Zealand, she says.
"He got promoted. He's now the new director of Australian supermarkets for Woolworths, so big, big job.
"He's already there and from Easter, that's it, he doesn't come back."
She says she rang him the other day and he asked her what she had done that day.
"I said, 'I've put our house on the market, interviewed real estate agents, put our beach house on the market and put my car on Trade Me.'"
She has already been over to look for a house to rent for a year until they find their feet and buy, but wherever they live it probably won't match the emotional pull of the house they have here on the cliff top which is only a stone's throw to the beach.
They had the house built to their dream specifications and have lived in it a mere two years.
"It's very, very hard to let it go and it's a little bit upsetting to be honest, but I guess home is where the family is and not necessarily in bricks and mortar."
The house was designed by architect John Cornthwaite and built by David Barnes, who Karen says is a great team and accommodated everything she wanted. That didn't include a pool but that's because the site is only 90 seconds from the beach anyway.
"The ocean's our pool," says Karen.
From the expansive deck you can see Rangitoto and the end of the Coromandel Peninsula, and from upstairs you can see the city all around, she says.
High on Karen's list of must-haves was a beautiful kitchen -- she loves to cook and writes cooking columns for the local paper.
Image 1 of 8: Supermarket director's lovely pad has gold in the bench and the beach less than 100m away
The rich granite benchtop is about 4m long and she thinks it came from Iran: "You can see there's gold in it, you can actually see little flecks of gold here and there."
The granite carries through into a butler's pantry which is so big her nephew thought they had a butler moving in.
"I've got a little office area here... I sit here and write recipes or do my correspondence."
The living level also has a guest room with en suite and also "Dave's room" -- which has a big TV and sporting memorabilia on the walls.
Downstairs is daughter Sam's room and another bedroom, but up the glass stairwell is Karen and Dave's domain.
The master bedroom looks out across the ocean and has a large en suite, and around the other side of the stairs is a big walk-in wardrobe/dressing room, which has another room for suitcases -- "we call this Harry Potter's bedroom" -- and on this landing is a door to a lift.
"We put an elevator in because we've got three floors and we didn't want to have to move one day if we couldn't walk up and down the stairs. This was our forever home."
Although Sam, who is 24, is not moving with them, Karen is comforted by the fact that Fred, her miniature schnauzer, is heading to Sydney too, though she's a bit worried he might be scared by the size of the spiders.
"I was over there on Wednesday and there was this massive spider, I thought I've never seen anything so big ... "
