For Wendy Hetherington, the excitement of creating a home is one thing. Sourcing and styling it to complete its signature charm is a whole other level.
For this passionate collector, it’s the excuse she doesn’t need to fossick around in her mother’s attic among long-forgotten antiques and collectibles.
She did so here and found the perfect door hook for her laundry basket in a copper bucket full of old hooks. “I hadn’t seen that for 20 years and I’d forgotten all about it. That was exciting,” she says.
It was a “win win” for Wendy and her mother Margaret, who owns Warkworth’s Red Barn Antiques. For Wendy, who started collecting as a 16-year-old, it was the chance to edit her stash and bring this, her third character home to life. For Margaret, it has given her more space for her own finds.
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As for the evolution of this home, it was dinner with friends near here at Christmas two years ago that handed Wendy and her husband, builder Neville Snooks the rural lifestyle swap from Omaha that they had been looking for.
When their friends mentioned they were planning to slice off a block of their land for sale, they suggested taking a walk to check out the landscape with its flat land and the crescent of a hill leading down to a stream. The deal sealed, they started drawing up their house and the result of their eight-month build is a home with rustic charm and texture inside and out.
“It’s a home designed with great thought and it’s very easy to live in”, says Debbie Lee of Maximise Real Estate. This couple’s choice of band-sawn pine weatherboards was “to give it that barn look”, says Wendy, who has nine new homes/renovations to her credit. That same band-sawn texture is in the timber of their pitched ceiling of their living area and in other rooms as either vertical or horizontal textural feature walls.
That is part of their skilful use of the various different timbers used elsewhere in the house. Their bespoke front door is Oregon, their floors are stained and oiled French Oak and their gallery wall is kauri ceiling boards from a boarding house renovation project in Herne Bay.
Their laundry cabinetry includes demolition kauri flooring timber. Their scullery benches are solid kauri from Wendy’s mother. The kitchen further showcases Neville’s craftsman ship with their German Oak cabinetry and the top of the steel-framed island bench.
Wendy’s inherited love of furniture restoration, her instinctive eye for design and her colour consultancy background is behind the aesthetic balance throughout the house.
Her white walls offset the timber and allow her inherited Samoan family memorabilia to tell their story unencumbered. “I wanted to incorporate that because it was part of my history.” Considerable thought went into Wendy’s choice of brown tones inside and out.
The exterior weatherboard stain was specially mixed. “I wanted a very plain mid brown, a true brown. Everything out there had too much grey and there is no grey anywhere in this house,” she says. Likewise, the brown of her dark French Oak floors has a gold touch to its tone. In the kitchen, chocolate brown engineered bench tops fitted her brief perfectly.
Filled with charming stories, this house has rewarded them a light-filled connection to their surroundings and their guests in their separate studio with a touch of the New Zealand rural experience.
Of the house that Wendy describes as one of her dream homes, she says “It has a lovely flow to it and it has been wonderful to live in.”
Find out more about 101 Grange Street, Snells Beach
