Groovy kind of love |
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A few kilometres from Whangarei lies a wormhole into the galaxy far, far away that was 1976. Rock up in your bell bottoms, platforms and peasant top, leave your jaw at the door as you enter, and if you don’t tear into town afterwards for a layered shag do and a lava lamp you’re less impressionable than me.
Perhaps the greatest of its astonishments is that this dream home, the work of a local builder and his wife, had the good fortune to pass into the hands of Murray Chick and Alan O’Donoghue. How easily it could have become the property of some slave to the neutral colour palette, with no respect for wishing wells in foyers, internal archways, sparkly ceilings, mauve faux-marble formica vanities, vinyl-upholstered bars or the insanely wonderful geometric wallpapers that have you asking yourself, have I been slipped a mind-altering drug?
Of course not. But mine hosts do supply a delicious curry, an invitation to stay any time and, to take home, a bag of watercress and another of juicy oranges. Eggs manufactured by the glossy harem of the handsomest rooster you’ve ever seen are also on offer, shells thoughtfully inscribed with the dates they were laid. “They don’t come out like that,” says Alan.
Three cheerful fox terriers scamper about one-and-a-bit lovingly tended hectares and two courteous cats prise open welcoming eyes before they plunge back into sleep. You couldn’t find kindlier hosts or pets, or a home more generously equipped for hospitality.
One half of it would be roomy enough – some apartment bedrooms are smaller than its walk-in wardrobes – but there’s also a large games room, which contains a pool table, and a pool room, which contains a pool.
Little wonder, then, that yours truly believed that the vaguely boomerang-shaped edifice she’d arrived at was a row of units; possibly a small retirement village.
“You need public transport to get from one end to the other,” says an inspired house guest, scouring TradeMe on his laptop for 1970s artefacts of his own.
Murray and Alan were together but living separately when the former decided to leave his Earthsea Gardens at Matapouri Bay near Whangarei for something nearer town. Alan, who had a house furnished in 1960s style at Onerahi, was smitten by the curving, tree-flanked drive and head-over-heels when he saw that the house would last as long as any pharaoh’s pyramid. Its cedar frame, Unispan concrete base, brick walls, plate-glass sliders, extra-wide windows, hefty aluminium joinery, copper nails and Monier tile roof are “almost commercial rather than domestic construction”.
Murray bought it and Alan moved in a year later. The house had been rented for a bit. Weeds nested in the guttering and the dining and living areas needed a coat of paint but the condition of the rest was so mint it presented a dilemma: strip out the in-your-face legacy of former owners for whom no material, fixture or fitting had been too good, too big or too 1976, or learn not just to live with it, but love it.
Option two was the cheapest, certainly the bravest, and though Murray and Alan didn’t embrace the 1970s overnight they committed themselves utterly when they did. They even acquired, from an old boy in Dargaville, the powder blue 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood in the four-car garage under the house.
A robust brick well – “It’s meant to have a fountain, but it doesn’t,” says Alan – remains the focal point of the foyer, beating off fierce competition from the animal-print chaise longue, wind-up gramophone, countless black busts and figurines, five china cabinets, rock gardens and patterned amber glass that surround it.
Preserved, too, are a spare bedroom’s gold, brown and mustard geometric wallpaper teamed with shot-silk purple curtains; a loo’s cartoonish duck shooter, trousers round his ankles, whose manhood is the light switch; the bars in the pool and games rooms; the tiled kitchen benches as wide as single beds and a pantry bigger than the average corner dairy.
“The kitchen belongs to Alan. I don’t go near it,” says Murray, the quieter of the two, though Alan insists he’s a terrific cook. The fastidiously tended lawns, flowers, vegetables and trees testify that he’s a terrific gardener too. “Murray has the place looking like a showpiece constantly,” says Alan. “He works every day and he is extremely disciplined with what he does and achieves. Everything is easy on the eye and in order.”
In early 2011, the garden will be the venue for A Work of Art, an exhibition by local artists. Murray and Alan are sharers: friends have married at their house; children adore the place. Every six months they throw a party to celebrate the turning on or turning off of the heated pool with spa jets.
As part of this year’s Easter egg hunt, they hid foil-wrapped chocolate eggs in the hen house. The chooks did their best to hatch them and melted the contents with their feathery warmth, which only goes to show how friendly and nurturing everybody here is. It’s life, Jim, but not life as we know it. More’s the pity.
Story: Prue Dashfield
Photographs: Melanie Jenkins
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