- Ryan and Candice’s renovated Grey Lynn house, named Paxos, features Mediterranean and Balinese styling.
- The couple’s redesign includes a heated mineral pool, wellness studio and extensive interior updates.
- They are selling the house for family reasons, with strong interest expected due to its unique design.
An Auckland couple who quit New Zealand two years ago after a headline-making house sale are back, and selling their latest renovation project.
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Ryan and Candice Pellett’s luxury house on Beach Road, in Waiake, became hot property in 2024 after the couple declared that they were prepared to sell everything before heading overseas.
They dropped the price to below its market value and even offered to throw in a $50,000 Tesla for free to sweeten the deal.
The house, one of OneRoof’s most viewed listings that year, was sold for $2.37 million to returning expats, who passed on the flash car.
Ryan and Candice in their backyard, which boasts a resort-style pool area and a studio gym. Photo / Supplied
The renovated house has a Greek-style finish. Photo / Supplied
Before they set off on their global adventure with their children, Ryan and Candice bought a three-bedroom 1940s house at 25 Baildon Road, in Auckland’s Grey Lynn.
They planned to manage the renovation from overseas, but delays in building consents stymied their dream of returning to a finished house with Mediterranean and Balinese styling. When they got back to New Zealand in February 2025, the rebuild had barely begun.
They didn’t have a kitchen or bathroom, so for their first few months back home, the family lived in chaos, bathing in buckets and rolling up their sleeves to do much of the finishing themselves.
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The family detailed their renovation adventures on their Instagram account. “We called our Instagram Grey Lynn to Greece because in Bali it is all very Greek style,” Candice told OneRoof.
“We had started when we were in Greece. We really enjoyed our time there, but it was interesting to go to Bali and see that they were still doing that Mediterranean thing there. It was amazing.
“We thought, ‘how do we bring this home?’.”
Living through the chaos of a major renovation was not part of the plan. “It is not what we thought we were coming back to. We had said [after the last reno] we are not going to put the kids through that again.”
What the 1940s Art Deco house looked like two years ago before the makeover. Photo / Supplied
The backyard studio and lawn that the Pelletts inherited. Photo / Supplied
The couple’s redesign opened up the kitchen and a new dining room to the backyard. They rearranged the two bedrooms, the laundry and the downstairs bathroom, and they updated the steel and timber stairs. Upstairs, the master suite got a new waterproof deck, a walk-in wardrobe and a bathroom.
The final part of the transformation turned the rough backyard into a resort with a heated mineral swimming pool and a wellness/gym studio. “Creating a true oasis to come home to was important to us. The renovation became about more than design. It was about wellness and lifestyle,” Candice told OneRoof.
The family have dubbed the house Paxos, in honour of the Greek Islands Paros and Naxos and the Greek word for peace (paxis).
“It is so relaxing to be in there, the colours as you walk in the door. The vibe is just ‘breathe out’.
“Stepping outside feels like arriving at a boutique hotel in Greece or a Bali resort, rather than simply walking into a backyard in Auckland.”
The luxurious master suite has a deck and city views. Photo / Supplied
The German kitchen features European appliances, with a banquette seat fitted into the curved wall. Photo / Supplied
The new dining room opens to the resort-style backyard. Photo / Supplied
The couple are selling up for family reasons, so the just-finished house will be enjoyed by someone else. “We really want to make the most of the house, so we’ll probably be having quite a few social things. Our friends come over and just go, ‘please can I come back and live there’,” she said.
Ryan has just started as a real estate agent with Ray White and his colleagues Scott and Chloe Wither are selling the Baildon Road property.
Scott told OneRoof that the house was unlike anything else in Grey Lynn. “It wasn’t done for sale; it was done for them. You can see that in the quality of the product they have put in there,” he said.
“A really, really special home, and we expect the interest will be strong.”
The agent said that with no comparable properties in the inner-city suburbs, it was hard to say what the property would fetch. Because of the strong design, he expected interested buyers to come from across the city.
- 25 Baildon Road, Grey Lynn, Auckland, goes to auction on March 25
