The interior of Cassandra Ellis’ Northcote Point cottage has more than a touch of English romance about it. Her thoughtfully chosen combination of velvets, silks, chintzy florals, mismatched chairs, pine cabinets and battered antique chests is a serendipitous, not to say deliciously apt, decorating style since, for the past fifteen months, Cassandra’s home has been the backdrop to her own English romance with London-based Ed Prichard.
Please click here to view all the images from this article.In January last year Cassandra was strolling along a suburban Grey Lynn street, minding her own business, when a holidaying patron enjoying a tipple in the Gypsy Tea Room took one look at her and was smitten. That patron was Ed and he and Cassandra have been conducting a long-distance love affair ever since. Evidently he is now a commuter, travelling frequently between Auckland and London, where he works in advertising as a creative director.
“Now, this is romantic,” warns Cassandra, before explaining that Ed regularly makes compilation CDs, complete with artwork and covers he has created himself, especially for her. He’s up to volume nine at the moment. Volume ten is due any day. And every couple of days she receives a handwritten vintage postcard from Ed. To those cynics who wonder whether the man is email capable, the answer is yes; it’s just that electronic messages don’t convey quite the same sentiment as the old-fashioned variety.
Freshly back from the United Kingdom, where she had adored “the noise, the museums, buildings and history, all that kind of stuff”, Cassandra moved into her North Shore haven in 2002. The supreme irony that this Kiwi girl had spent the previous seven years working in London only to happen upon Englishman Ed half a world away in Grey Lynn is not lost on her.
Judging by its classic weatherboard facade, with twin verandas, stained-glass windows and floors of golden matai, her two-storey home seems to be about 100 years old. In fact, it and the other dozen or so houses in the little tree-lined street were constructed in the 1990s out of recycled materials and in a traditional design − purpose-built to look vintage from day one.
