If every house has its theme song, then Edith Piaf’s No Regrets would be Susan and Peter Skellett’s pick for their French Country-style home in Nelson. Asked if there’s anything they would do differently with the hindsight of two years living in the house they designed, they both come up blank.
Which is just as it should be, given the planning that went into the place. The veterans of several renovations and additions back in Peter’s native England, they knew this would be their last house. So every detail, from furniture placement and working patterns in the kitchen – left to right or right to left? – to the shaping of two fireplaces, eventually built by Peter using leftover Hebel concrete blocks, was nutted out in “lively discussions” long before a builder’s van came near the site.
The great irony is that all the attention to detail was in pursuit of a style that is the definition of homely and casual. As Susan says, in French Country houses “nothing really matches”.
On that count they have succeeded wonderfully. Set on a little under a hectare of land in a relatively new hillside subdivision high above Nelson Haven, the house has been expertly distressed to give it a feeling of age.
Peter, whose background is in antique furniture dealing and restoration, spent countless hours adzing the hefty French oak ceiling beams. Plastering was allowed to lump, walls to bend and flooring bricks were sliced and filled with black grouting then placed with little fuss. “Unlike Kiwi houses, nothing here is pristine,” he says.
Throw in the shuttered windows with their boxes of geraniums, the two dogs flopped on those distressed brick floors and you could almost be in Provence. Yet the funny thing is that neither Susan nor Peter is a hardcore Francophile. In fact, if they had gone with their original plan of settling in Hanmer, they probably would have built a Swiss-style mountain house.
So why French? And why Nelson? Susan, who was raised in New Zealand, says she pestered Peter to take her home for 25 years after the pair met and married within four months and settled down in Surrey, England. They were looking at Arrowtown and Hanmer until they remembered a Nelsonian they once met in England, who advised them not to commit before they’d visited the town. “We walked to the top of Trafalgar Street and thought, ‘Yes, this is where we want to live!’”
The section they eventually found in Atawhai had sublime views across Tasman Bay to Mt Arthur, but it was seriously steep, requiring a major cut and plenty of infilling out front. Even with just under a hectare of land, the buildable area was always going to be limited.
A two-storey French country house just seemed right for the location, says Susan. “We had spent a lot of time in the south of France and seen a lot of places and we had always liked that style. The French are like Kiwis – that make-do-and-mend mentality. They’re not as flamboyant as the Italians, with all the marble and glamour. They will have an old round table they haven’t any use for and they will cut it in half and reuse a bit of it here and a bit over there.”
Designing the house was an equal partnership that played to their respective strengths. Peter, the craftsman whose business had also involved cabinet-making, provided practical know-how and drawing skills. He also project-managed the team of three builders, all experienced and knowledgeable chippies who weren’t fazed by the unusual nature of the build. Susan, who once designed spec homes, took on the interior design.
Even so, there were some humdinger rows. Susan says she’d always wanted the curving staircase to be in the middle of the house. “Being terribly English, it took Peter a while to get his head around that one.” And her request that he cut a hole in a Regency chest of drawers in order to accommodate a bathroom basin provoked visceral horror.
In a reversal of the usual process, the house, which is built from Hebel blocks, was planned around specific pieces of furniture, mostly antiques brought from the UK. Treasured pieces include a 1905 walnut desk in the office at the top of the stairs, a pair of heavy French oak front doors bought from a reclamation yard and a Louis XIV piece that determined the exact dimensions of the hall. Room sizes were governed by the length of the containers used to ship the French oak construction beams to New Zealand.
Inlaid into some of the walls are several strips of 400-year-old English oak retrieved from a demolished stables. Susan laughs remembering the reaction of airport MAF staff when they saw that lot arriving. “They thought we’d bought our old firewood with us.”
Outside, Peter and Susan have run with the Gallic theme. At the head of the driveway is a three-storey tower and barn inspired by a French pigeonnier (or dovecote) that includes a bedroom and kitchen. The Skelletts lived in it for 18 months while the main house was being built and they now let it as a B&B during summer months. In the gardens, Susan has created box hedging, French-style topiary, beds of lavender and avenues of cypresses. She also grows strawberries and herbs in a “very French” wire-enclosed potager.
But the French connection hasn’t dictated every choice. “There’s a nod to that French formality but I also like dinky little paths.”
In any case, her clear sense of humour wouldn’t have allowed the garden to get po-faced. The hen house, for example, was inspired by the builders’ Portaloo and decked out with shutters; the sheep shelter is roofed in French canal tiles.
Those lucky animals enjoy some million-dollar views. Susan says her favourite time of the year is winter, when the ranges across the water appear as sharp as cut-outs, blanketed in snow.
And what in the house are they most proud of? A long pause follows. “I like all of it, actually,” says Peter finally. Je ne regrette rien.'
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