Relaxed to the max

Initially, Karen was unimpressed when Bob suggested they give up their spacious Tauranga home to live on the other side of the Kaimai Range. But, once Bob had lured her over the hill with the promise of a good cafe lunch, she liked what she saw.

“There’s a nice feeling in the town,” she says. “It’s full of life. There are a lot of people like ourselves who’ve come from other places because they wanted to live somewhere quieter. Now we walk to the gym and the library, the supermarket, the post office. Sometimes the car doesn’t go out for two weeks.”

When the Lees moved inland six years ago, they were fed up with work pressures and the pace of city life. They liked the idea of cashing up and working less, having more time and more disposable income.

“We got sick of the rat race, the traffic,” Bob says. “We talked about it for a long time but where the hell were we going to go? We didn’t want to be completely isolated. Here, we’re more central. We’re not really trapped in a small town – Hamilton is 40 minutes away, Tauranga is 50, Auckland is 90.”

So he put his shop fitting business on the back burner and Karen did the same with her busy acupuncture practice. Their first purchase was a 0.8ha property just out of Te Aroha.

“We looked at one another and said, ‘What are we going to do?’” Karen says. “We didn’t fancy the idea of being old people who get out and garden every day. Even the dog was depressed. He couldn’t see anything but quails. We loved the place but we’re not gardeners. We thought we might like to be but it was a dream really.”

Deciding on their next move became more pressing once the for sale sign went up; the property sold within a week. >

After much panicked house hunting, they stumbled on a solid and seemingly charmless two-storey commercial building in the middle of town. Bob realised there was room for Karen’s acupuncture centre and his workshop, plus a generous section out the back and plenty of scope to develop an apartment upstairs. What’s more, the absence of fancy mouldings and architectural frippery gave him leave to create his own masterpiece from a clean slate.

First he found two burly blokes to smash through the thick concrete interior walls and help him haul eight tonnes of debris downstairs and through the front door. They also removed the large 1960s Jesus Loves You picture dating back to the building’s earlier days as a youth club venue. Office partitions were torn down and shop fittings removed from the main floor. Only the staircase handrail was deemed worthy of preservation.

Next Bob started work on the framing, structure and door frames. He installed windows, built kitchen fittings and designed everything from pillars to bathroom cabinetry. A small balcony was added to capture evening sunsets at the front of the building; at the back, a conservatory off the master bedroom faces the mountain.

“I’ve always liked making things,” Bob says. “Models, forts in the bush, stuff like that. For me, it was a joy.”

The apartment is designed to accommodate a lifetime of treasures and trinkets. Masks and carvings from Asian travels perch alongside antiques and modern pieces.

Bob points out the Chinese Buddha he purchased at the age of 16 after his mother made him return the gun he had bought from an antiques shop. Bob and Karen spent three days bargaining for the Chinese wall plaque that sits on their coffee table and found the old American phone in Ohio, courtesy of an internet auction site.

Which launches Bob into his pet hate: “I can’t be bothered with this current trend – people who paint their house beige on the inside and beige on the outside and then go and get a coloured vase and plonk it in a corner. People wind up living in houses dressed up for other people.

“I’m sick to death of modernism and minimalism, which today is more about cheapness than good design,” he says, before his wife laughingly adds, “Our place is totally maximalist.”

Though the Lees have both returned to their respective careers, they now see fewer clients and are spending more time travelling. In between they take their dogs for a stroll through town or head up the road to soak in the hot pools.

“It’s a quieter, more relaxed lifestyle,” says Bob. “We have more leisure time and people here are friendlier and more helpful because they have more time.”

Story: Sue Hoffart Photographs: Nicola Topping