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Update: Pip and Greg sent in some photos of their property under a white blanket. Take a look at the images here.
“Faithful wife will take no lovers.” The sign leaning up outside the Rookes’ front door was commissioned by the last emperor of China for his wife (a wife, by the by, who used to call her husband “eunuch”).
When Pip Rooke found this relic of conjugal strife for sale in China, she just had to have it. The sign now presides over the home she shares with her husband Greg in the lofty reaches of the Crown Range, the mountains that lie between Queenstown and Wanaka.
The emperor’s rebuke at the entrance is the first hint you get of the Eastern homage within. During the couple’s 15 years in China (13 in Hong Kong, two in Shanghai), Asia got deep under their skin – so much so that Greg’s Chinese colleagues called him an egg: white on the outside, yellow on the inside. This new house of theirs is a little bit eggy too: its sleek, unfussy, modern exterior belies its exquisite Asian-influenced interior.
When the Rookes swapped the clamour of Shanghai for the serenity of the Crown Range last year, it took them a while to acclimatise to the silence.
“We went from 20 million people to no one,” says Pip. “Shanghai is a bizarre place; fabulous in many ways but the pollution was right up to your window every day, seven days a week – it was 24-hour noise.”
Perched as they are on a corner of farmland just off New Zealand’s highest main road, the Rookes now share their rarefied air with just 20 or so other houses. “We’re eye-level with the beginning of a mountain range so that’s very uplifting,” says Pip. “We’re actually at the same height as the top of the gondola in Queenstown.
“I love driving down the Crown Range – there’ll be somebody paragliding above you, there’ll be a helicopter taking off, there’ll be a little plane doing barrel rolls. There’s just so much activity. And the landscape up here is very undulating. It looks kind of Italian with its swaying poplars – it’s not what you’d expect.”
Pip’s from Canterbury; Greg’s from Sydney. Pip’s a skier; Greg’s a surfer. So, in a perfectly equitable marital equation, they split their time between the snow-happy Crown Range and a beach-hugging house in Sydney. They’ve even called both homes Pelangi – a Malaysian word meaning “end of the rainbow”.
Greg says he still stops at the lookout points when driving up the Crown Range so that he can marvel at the landscape like a tourist.
He also salutes the home’s splendid isolation by taking in the brisk alpine air under his outdoor shower each morning.
Having spent 15 years trussed up in high white collars as chairman of a company in China, Greg is embracing a new, self-devised dress code. Pip says he’s famous among the locals for getting about, mid-winter, in a pair of skimpy shorts and various other seasonally inappropriate outfits (she calls it his cross-dressing habit). “He loves to wear his rugby shorts and things with holes in them because he spent his life in a business suit and cuff links. He thinks it’s bliss.”
To stay true to the spirit of the alpine farmland they occupy, the Rookes decided against a formal garden and opted instead for the unruly golden delights of tussock. The house is also a pared-down mix: glass, wood and Oamaru stone. In a bid to ensure that the stone was pure cream and free of any auburn streaks, Pip made a trip to the Oamaru quarry armed with home baking.
“I took a big chocolate cake, which was completely unnecessary. When I got to the quarry they weren’t the slightest bit interested in meeting me and they said, ‘Look, you get what you get with Oamaru stone.’ They were men with big cutters and diggers and they were like, ‘What are you doing here? This is a bloke’s place.’ But they were very happy about the chocolate cake. They said, ‘Great, pop it in the tearoom.’” Pip did get her auburn-free stone in the end, but whether it was a case of chocolate persuasion she’ll never know.
The Rookes gave their architect Murray Cockburn a fairly simple brief: they wanted a long, low home with high ceilings, doors that slid back or pivoted (Pip hates doorknobs with a passion) and a hallway-cum-gallery that could accommodate their large contemporary art collection. Murray answered their brief so perfectly that the house scooped a prize at last year’s Southern Architecture Awards for its artful twinning of home and gallery. But it’s not as formal as all that, Pip says. “Being a surfer, Greg wanted to build a beach house in the snow. And he did – sort of. We both got a bit of what we wanted.”
They also wanted an interior that wouldn’t spar noisily with their prized Asian furnishings and antiques. During their time in China, Pip indulged her love of interior design, travelling to various neighbouring countries to sniff out items of great gorgeousness to export and sell to private clients back in China (she used to sell five containers’ worth of gear from her apartment every year).
Keen to introduce others to Asia’s artsy-crafty abundance, without being anchored to a retail store, Pip is about to launch a new business venture: an interior styling service that will allow her to remain happily untethered. Her cunning plan is to take groups of New Zealand and Australian clients off to visit the network of trusted merchants and friends she’s built up within the Asian region. Under Pip’s guidance they’ll be able to source unique items for their homes while soaking up the stories and lore associated with their purchases. Sounds like play dressed up as work and she knows it.
Greg, meanwhile, is keen to follow Pip on her Asian adventures. He’s even devised a new job description for himself: Faithful Husband Will Carry Wife’s Bags.
Story: Claire Finlayson
Photographs: Aaron McLean
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