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The house Alan and Luba Perry built on the hill above Peka Peka beach glows in the early evening.
Buying a windswept, near-vertical section and building a new house isn’t top of the to-do list for most people in their 70s. Everyone said the Perrys were mad to do it. “Brand new section, brand new house, new garden. They were partly right,” concedes Alan Perry.
Especially when his wife, Luba, fell over on the steep, rocky site they had owned for just weeks and broke her leg. But today all that is forgotten as the couple survey their partially tamed section and Kapiti’s orange evening sky from their wide, low-slung living area.
Alan and Luba Perry were well known in Wellington in the convivial 1980s for their multi-award-winning restaurant Country Life, which butted up against the main road just before Waikanae in a flurry of green. An eatery is still there in a different guise.
Country Life used to be a favourite of corporate high-spenders, though it was initially patronised by friends and friends-of-friends of Alan and Luba and their partners. They decided to open the restaurant with the same optimistic enthusiasm with which they later decided on the house. Their philosophy then and now: “Let’s do it. Let’s throw caution to the wind.” After all, Luba liked entertaining and cooking and Alan had an excellent collection of wine.
“It seemed an easy thing to do,” says Luba, “but a restaurant and dinner parties are two different things.”
But both ventures turned out perfectly. The restaurant acquired a peerless reputation and the design and building of the house have gone equally well. Alan says they managed, through a combination of luck and application, to gather a pleasant team around them.
Like the rest of the house, the master bedroom has a breathtaking view: Mana Island can be seen to the left, and Kapiti Island to the right.
“It was all very happy. Quite rare I think.” It helped that he trained as a quantity surveyor in Britain before emigrating to New Zealand, where he met Russian-born Luba. Both arrived in the 1950s.
They have lived at Peka Peka since their “great 10 years” running the restaurant. At first, home was a beach house to which they added before building another on the same spot. Eventually the neighbours subdivided and they decided on a shift.
“We saw brand new houses on beautiful sections but the houses were terrible and, because we’d lived in a nice house, we became disenchanted,” says Alan. “We saw the section up here two years ago and decided to go for it. I can’t think of a better place to live. It’s perfect and it looks out over this view.” A view, says Luba, that they hope never to take for granted.
They wanted a house built on one level, with an easy entry that evolved as a long, sloping, curving ramp at the back which runs from the interior garage door to the living area. The ramp looks great and is practical but, Alan says, it caused “a few headaches” for architectural designer Darren Hunter, Cameron Builders and the local tilers who had to tailor and fit hundreds of tiles to line the curving walls and floors of the adjacent master en suite and the ramp itself.
Alongside the ramp runs an elegant and similarly curved nine-metre-long bookshelf laden with Luba’s books, Alan’s magazines and piles of well-thumbed cookery books.
The open living rooms merge into one another beyond. Glazing that stretches the width of the house is punctuated with an indoor/outdoor zinc chimney, the work of friend and craftsman Hartmut Reichelt, who also fashioned the outdoor metal columns and fascia.
At the far end of the house is “Luba’s room”, though so far the name is just a reminder of the reading and relaxation she intends to indulge in there when she has the time.
The couple has bought little new furniture for the house apart from two modern kitchen stools which stand by the island in a kitchen that is a streamlined sweep of stainless steel and handle-free cupboards.
Underneath a large portrait by Irene A’Court of their two little granddaughters – now grown up – is an antique oak dresser bought “years ago. We have to treat it gently,” says Luba. “We quite like old bits and pieces in new houses.”
The Eames chair in the living room is “years old. We haven’t bought anything because we don’t need anything and I don’t want to change things for the sake of it,” says Luba, though Alan does admit to a predilection for new kitchens and bathrooms. “Even now I look at showrooms to see what we missed out on,” says Alan.
All the floors are covered with mocha-coloured tiles, giving a streamlined look that harbours no surprises. Luba recalls the horror of pulling up a carpet in their previous house and seeing what had collected underneath.
Outside, landscaping work continues, but in a less frenzied manner. “If we need to bring stones or topsoil up in a wheelbarrow, we take it easy,” says Luba.
Story: Diana Dekker
Photographs: Paul McCredie
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