GIFT OF JOY

Uninhibited use of colour and pattern delivers a home that's merry and bright - and not just at Christmas

- Shelley Tustin

With a table and Christmas tree ablaze with riotous colour, Brooke and David’s home is set for a joyeux Noel, with an emphasis on the joyeux. But for this household, which includes the couple’s two children and Brooke’s sister Jesika, the saturation of colour and festive feeling of warmth and welcome is not a seasonal affectation – this is a place of joy throughout the year.

Chaos energy

“Christmas for us is a wild, hectic time,” says Brooke. With big families around them, she explains, “We’ve got like five Christmases in two days and we host at least two of them.” While it sounds hectic indeed, the bliss of being enveloped by family and friends is the major reason Brooke and David ended up in this house at Red Beach, north of Auckland.

“It was a full circle moment,” says Brooke, who had spent large chunks of her childhood in the area, but had initially dismissed it, despite its charms, as a pensioners’ paradise.

“We bought our first little home in south Auckland and had our two babies out there, but I just never felt grounded,” she says. What she was missing, but couldn’t articulate at the time, was a sense of community. She recalls the series of pivotal moments that compelled their move.

“We were at the surf club and it was full of families. Then, everyone knows everyone, so I would be at the supermarket and running into my dad’s golf buddies. It felt like we were coming home.”

But the course of true home love never runs smoothly. The relocation encountered a fair few road bumps – missed sales, nine months spent crashing with Brooke’s dad, Covid – but fortune finally favoured them. En route to another auction, the couple took a “stress drive” and spotted a tiny private sale sign on a fence.