After years in limbo, a foodie finds peace in her own Auckland haven.
Shifting from large and new to smaller and old has given this foodie a place all her own
Sarah Tuck answers her frosted white front door dressed in black – a chic silk-collared shirt, an impeccably cut blazer and slim leather pants. With her cropped bleached blonde hair, the recently appointed editor of dish magazine could be easily mistaken for singer Annie Lennox.
She leads the way down a narrow passageway into a bright open-plan living area, complete with a drum kit in one corner. “I chose my drums to match the colours of my interiors because I knew they wouldn’t be locked away in a room,” she says.
“I play as badly as a five-year-old on a recorder. But I have a friend who is a drummer and when I have gatherings here, he always ends up on the drums. Instant atmosphere.”
The drums are a new addition, but most of the other furniture in the space – bar a few purchases from the store Indie Home Collective – was culled from her former shared family home after a massive downsizing exercise. “Some people are quite sentimental, but I can be quite brutal,” she says. “I only kept my favourite things.”
Sarah’s divorce is well-documented in her soughtafter cookbook, Coming Unstuck: Recipes to Get You Back on Track. In the introduction to the book, she shares how she came “unstuck” after her younger
son followed his brother and went off to university and her husband left a few months later to explore a new life. She turned to what she loves most: cooking and photographing the results, even if she billed those first meals “sad-arse dinners for one”.
The family home had been a modern fourbedroom house on the other side of Auckland (NZ House & Garden, November 2017) that Sarah and her then-husband had bought to live in while they built a house on Waiheke Island.
When that didn’t happen, Sarah found herself saddled with the house for three years while she waited for the divorce to be finalised. She then searched for a new home.
“I almost bought the first house I went to look at in Parnell,” she says, as she makes herself a macchiato in the black and white kitchen of her blessedly smaller Ponsonby villa. “I went to the auction, but then I thought it was ridiculous to jump the gun and that there were probably lots of lovely houses. I didn’t see another house I liked for a year.”
During those 12 months, Sarah’s priorities shifted and she began spending more time in Ponsonby. “I was still working as a freelancer but I knew that I didn’t want to continue working on my own,” she says. “So I decided to buy a house for the life that I wanted, not the life that I had.”
She was in negotiation with the seller when she got her job at dish. “It seemed like it was meant to be. It is the easiest house and it takes me 12 minutes to get to the office.”
‘I DECIDED TO BUY A HOUSE FOR THE LIFE THAT I WANTED, NOT THE LIFE THAT I HAD’
The three-bedroom villa, built in 1910, was gut-renovated six months before Sarah bought it. “They did an amazing job. It is unrecognisable compared with the photos I found online,” she says. “I live in the whole space all the time. And – perfect serendipity – it’s an amazing house to shoot in. It has the most fantastic, even light.”
But while it may work as a makeshift studio, the kitchen is ironically Sarah’s only disappointment. “It’s perfect for someone who doesn’t cook that much, but that’s not me,” she says, adding that she wishes there was a butler’s pantry where she could hide things away – akin to the walk-in closet in the
‘I GET SO MUCH PLEASURE WHEN I’M NOT COOKING FOR WORK... I TOTALLY FREESTYLE IT’
pristine master bedroom that brings her daily joy (she performs a mini jeté as she shows it off).
Still, it’s at the marble kitchen bench that Sarah’s frequent gatherings begin – drinks that turn into casual dinners or a bunch of friends cheering on the All Blacks.
“There’s always whiskey and always music,” she says. And of course there’s always food – no longer those “sad arse dinners for one”, but rather a mix of assembling and cooking. “I get so much pleasure when I am not cooking for work and I don’t have to write down the ingredients or think about what I’m doing. I totally freestyle it.”
For nibbles, she’ll often just break up warm brioche rolls and serve them with hot smoked salmon and wasabi mayonnaise, or she’ll serve home-made pizza. “Nothing fancy or complicated. I even buy the bases. But I put yum things on top like prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella or zucchini with chilli and lemon oil, and there’s always a nice green salad to go with it. I don’t think entertaining has to be formal or stressful.”
For summer, she’s planning some games nights. “All of the doors slide open on both sides of the deck. I want to put a volleyball net on the lawn and a pingpong table where the outdoor table is. It will be such good fun.”