History repeats

This mum-of-one with an eye for eclectic design never planned to live in her grandparents’ old Napier villa, but fate had other ideas

- Bonnie Sumner

Hannah Feltham never intended to buy the house her father grew up in – she didn’t even like villas – but after an open-home visit “just out of curiosity” in 2015, she decided that night to buy the century-old Napier property that had once belonged to her grandparents.

“It went on the market so Dad said, ‘Let’s just wander around and look at the old family home,’” says Hannah. “I didn’t actually love it – I prefer 1970s houses – but I liked that there was that family connection and the big tree and the pool. It’s also quite hard to find a house on Hospital Hill in a sunny spot.”

The designer and mum-of-one also liked the amount of room she would have for her furniture and collectables. “I could finally put everything out and not have stuff in storage, and really let loose with all those nooks and crannies for putting things on display,” she says.

Hannah was just as surprised as anyone to find herself the new owner of a heritage villa.

THE HISTORY

Hannah’s connection to the house began with her grandparents, but it continued through her own childhood, when it was fortuitously owned by friends of the family.

“We always went there for barbecues and swimming and I had sleepovers with their daughters, so I knew the house well,” she says.

Hannah now sleeps in the same room that her grandparents once did, while 8-year-old daughter Grace is in her great-auntie Jane’s old room and often scales the same tree in the garden her granddad once climbed as a boy.

THE RENOVATIONS