Steven Aitchison and Alex Foo love colouring in their homes. As for following the crowd, well, that all depends.
“When we agree with the crowd that’s fine but we do what makes us happy,” Steven says.
Take the back door of their circa 1890s home at 21 Ponsonby Terrace in Ponsonby.
“Everyone is doing bi-folds and we could have done that but we wanted to keep that traditional element of the house,” he says.
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Everything beyond that defining door has honoured the integrity of this house in its tightly-held neighbourhood.
Elaine Ferguson, of Ray White, who is marketing this property, says “This double brick villa is most certainly an exciting find. Rare as it is unique, this home has all the modern conveniences while keeping its character charm.”
Her clients bought this house two years ago just as it was about to go on the market.
Alex was smitten with the brick work in particular, which is why they decided against the popular trend of bagging the brick and painting it black.
They both loved its potential for enhancing the colour and texture in their art collections.
“We never designed the decor here for resale as an investment property,” Steven says.
“We bounced ideas off each other and designed it around what we love and what we want to wake up to in the morning, work from home in and be around.”
They didn’t move into the house until the last month of the five-month renovation in 2019.
“We decided to let the builder do his thing and save our sanity,” Steven says.
The 125sqm house didn’t require any structural or layout changes so they gave themselves free reign to layer up colour on virtually every surface.
21 Ponsonby Terrace has three bedrooms, a bathroom and a garage.
They painted the roof, and joinery, installing new soundproof “hush” glass in their sash windows. They updated their kauri floors with a light grey paint finish and resealed and repainted the board and batten ceilings.
Behind the scenes, they turned the ceiling cavity into attic storage. When they rewired the house, they put the new power box inside a wardrobe rather than back on the hall wall.
Of their colour scheme, Steven says, “I’d love to say it was a formal thing but it was very organic.”
Their second lounge with its white walls and window shutters, and existing dark slate floor, is a case in point. They got talking about “framing the room” and it was Alex who suggested that they paint the ceiling dark, rather than the walls.
Their floral Axminster mat was cut from new carpet bought on Trade Me. For Steven, it reminds him of his childhood home in South Auckland.
Front and back on their 371sqm site, they chose low maintenance faux lawn and engineered timber decking with new planting.
“We bought this as our own home, we’ve treated it as such and we’ve loved it,” Steven says.
Now they’re happily about to do it all over again a few streets away, in a home that they won unexpectedly at auction.
21 Ponsonby Terrace in Ponsonby goes to auction on July 14.
