All Mine

A lifetime of travel, laughter and love was channelled into this new home, which was the realisation of a lifelong dream for a busy city dweller

- Sally Conor

When chartered accountant Cherise Barrie decided to build herself a weekend home in Matakana, north of Auckland, she knew exactly what she wanted – a home that would reflect her life, her experiences and her exacting tastes.

“Having a place in a rural area was my dream,” she says. “Living in a city apartment throughout the week, I wanted grass and space but not lots of maintenance so that I could just walk in on Friday night with the groceries and relax. I wanted it to have everything in it that I could want in a house and to be reflective of me – I have never built a house before so I had a blank canvas.”

When it came to deciding exactly what she would paint on that blank canvas, Cherise was inspired by her favourite destinations – the glorious landscapes of Tuscany, the stylish loft apartments of New York and the wide open spaces and coastal chic of the Hamptons in New York state – to come up with a vision she presented to her architects.

“I was sitting on a plane coming back from Sydney the day before I was due to meet the architects,” tells Cherise. “And I thought to myself, ‘What am I going to say I want my house to be?’ I arrived at the architect’s office with a pile of house magazines and lots of pages tagged and said, ‘This needs to look like that, and the kitchen like this’ – and they got my vision straight away.”

1 THE DESIGN