Channelling charm

“I read that,” says Sharon, “and I thought, that’s it.”

The second is demonstrated by the way the house is furnished. Sharon Steed is a chip off the block of her late grandmother, Joyce Millar, a woman who combined practicality with a design aesthetic that anticipated Cath Kidston’s by more than half a century. “I think she had a huge influence on me. She’d have loved all the Cath Kidston fabrics here.”

Sharon vividly remembers the lovely cream-spotted, lemon-coloured bedroom in her grandparents’ South Canterbury farmhouse, the cowboy and Indian wallpaper in another, the flower-patterned china and the Crown Lynn swans in the sitting room. “And she always had beautiful chocolates – that was our after-dinner treat.”

She was practical too. Gloved, hatted and fabulously frocked, Joyce would accompany her husband to the races, then come home to warm sick and motherless lambs in a box beside the fire that same evening. She tended her magnificent flowers and vegetables and taught her granddaughters just how to pluck a duck.

There’s a photograph of her on the cork board in the Steeds’ kitchen, along with one of Sharon that was snapped “in my more punkish days”. >

It’s hard to believe she had any. These days, Sharon looks as pretty and original as the dresses she makes and sells through Romantique in Grey Lynn and Birkenhead. The shop is the source of many of the pieces in the house she shares with her husband, two children and their cats.

Everything here is gorgeous – the vintage frocks hanging in the hall, each and every bit of furniture, the new and vintage fabrics, the crockery, the linen. Even the idle foosball table in the extension wears a flowered Cath Kidston cloth and a pink glass bowl of dahlias. But every piece or grouping has its aura of space and the line between a profusion of lovely things and confusing clutter is never crossed.

When Sharon, her English husband and their first child came to New Zealand from the UK, they bought a home in the country north of Auckland. But work was in the city and daughter Georgie was at school there, so seven years ago they bought an old villa in central Mt Eden. It had gorgeous blossom and camellia trees, a needy roof and, out the back, a tiny lean-to kitchen like a caravan’s and an adjoining bedroom built at ground level so the water came in when it rained.

“I liked it because it was quite shabby.” They lived in the house as it was for several years – time enough to decide exactly what to do with it.

“In a lot of ways I was quite scared to tackle such a big job,” says Sharon, who says she’ll happily renovate another home one day, despite knowing the realities.

Their south-facing extension had to admit as much light as possible and incorporate a pair of narrow, two-metre-high Baltic pine and wrought-iron doors from Yvonne Sanders Antiques in Epsom – source of all the light fittings and much of the furniture.

The eight-month renovation spanned the winter – “we lived in gumboots” – but the Steeds endured it cheerfully, even with a spirit of adventure. The children didn’t fuss about sharing a room, the excellent builders installed a makeshift sink in what was then the dining room and Sharon made do with a fridge, a microwave oven and an electric frying pan and thought about the kitchen taking shape behind her.

She had wanted it to be as simple as those in the country villas in Tuscany and Umbria, where the family had holidayed the year before. >

So, no breakfast bar and no island, just a long, creamy quartz bench, a huge electric oven with gas burners and a wide, deep sink. Sharon’s old floral china is displayed in glass-paned cupboards and the big dining table lends itself to family games, homework and cake mixing.

The foosball table is her husband’s and the glossy drum kit her son’s, but the furniture has Sharon written all over it. The French sofa has been recovered in a blue floral damask and the big squashy sofa in a pink floral Cath Kidston. The second sitting room has a rococo-style, four-door wardrobe in a cream crackle finish with scrolly golden mouldings. The finely carved and gilded desk has drawers lined with silk.

The Steeds’ bed is reproduction French but Sharon found the pink and beige fabric in which it is upholstered. The dressing table was a junk shop find and scrubbed up a treat. Among its pretty glass dishes is her grandmother’s red-haired, blue-eyed doll. “Her dressing table was covered with glass bowls too, just like mine.”

The pink French linen press in Georgie’s room is a work of art. Sharon coveted it for months before deciding, “What the heck, I’m buying it.” To her bitter disappointment, a Mr Kingsley Smith had bought it the day before. “Can you believe it? It sold yesterday,” she told her beloved, little dreaming she was addressing
the man himself. He said nothing. A couple of days later, the delivery truck turned up.

The extension floor is another work of art. It appears to be made of white and grey marble but in fact it’s concrete, cut and grouted to look like pavers, then painted by Auckland artist Ross Lewis.

The floor flows out of the house and across the backyard to the lawn and the outdoor room created from a collapsing single garage. It has been a sewing room for Sharon and now it’s a play and sleepover room for her children and the place where her husband’s racing cars belt around their track.

The house is as pretty outside as in. There are herbs, vegetables and strawberries in potagers on one side of the garden path and raspberry canes and a pocket rocket lemon tree on the other. Sharon’s cherished, blowsy dahlias are everywhere, the swan plants have gone mad and roses and marigolds enclosed by a nascent box hedge share the front garden with beetroot. “There’s space for it here but I also like the colour of the leaves.”

Story: Prue Dashfield Photographs: Kevin Emirali