Rachel Cooney admits that moving from New York to Kaipara Flats was a bit of a shock, at first. Seven years managing art galleries and luxury apartment buildings in New York City had left her accustomed to a pressure-cooker environment. Now living on a quiet lifestyle block surrounded by native bush and birds, Rachel is revelling in the tranquillity of the countryside. She and some local conservation-minded folk have even set up a land care group with to protect the native environment. Rachel was born in Minneapolis, USA and has lived in NZ, Australia and the UK. Living in Auckland in the 1980s and 90s, Rachel worked as a portrait painter. Two of her works hung in the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in 1992. When she lived in New York, she managed Lambert Fine Arts, a cutting-edge art gallery on Manhattan's Lower East Side. "If art were a person,” she says, “the experience of managing an art gallery in New York felt like existing in the very heart of that being. I loved it!" So if she loved New York so much, doesn't she feel like a fish out of water in Kaipara Flats? "No - the best things are universal. If you treat people really well, if you treat them with respect, they'll do the same to you, whether you're in Manhattan or Matakana." Her other great passion is the property business, where she worked for six years in Los Angeles and then three in New York.” Rachel now sells real estate with New Zealand Sotheby’s International Realty in Matakana. She has a business degree from AUT and attended high school at Epsom Girls' Grammar.