New horizons

They sailed the seas as super-yacht crew but now home is a slice of paradise in the Tutukaka bush

From the driveway, this Tutukaka home looks somewhat pedestrian. In fact, with its dressed pine poles and industrial sloping roof, it could be an agricultural shed. There is a tractor: a vintage David Brown refitted with road wheels for tugging dive boats. And there’s Millie, a footballmad tricolour border collie, who squeezes between slats in the wooden fence and bounds up to inveigle a team mate.

She’s the first surprise. Beyond the door at the back of the carport/workshop, what emerges beneath the mono-pitch is a home that feels unexpectedly bigger than its 80sqm, has an unforeseen level of sophistication and revels in a spectacular bush backdrop.

Tristan Jongejans and Sarah Farrelly were both born and bred on this coast. Tristan’s dad, Jeroen, came here in December 1979, cycling into the settlement on a trip around the country. A committed environmentalist, he saw, he stayed. He set up the business that was to become Dive Tutukaka and was instrumental in getting Poor Knights islands declared a marine reserve. Although Sarah’s family lived a stone’s throw away in Ngunguru, the couple connected on the other side of the world when they worked as crew on the super-yacht Amaryllis. Tristan was chief engineer, Sarah chief stewardess – a match made in a floating heaven. >

When Sarah met Tristan, the framing was already in for a home on this 6000sqm site near the marina. The land, bought two years earlier, had been used as a dumping ground for building waste for a huge development next door. “It needed to be made into a section,” says Tristan.

On brief trips home from his full-time yacht gig, he hopped aboard bulldozers to dig out rocks, shift rubble, and haul out wild ginger, gorse and pampas grass.

Tristan had called on an old Kamo High School friend, Tim Gittos of Spacecraft Architects, to design his New Zealand base. “Tim was always very bright at school so I knew he’d be one of the best at anything he did.” The blog that Tim and his architect partner Caroline Robertson updated as they designed and helped build their own first home helped convinced Tristan; such right brain/left brain activity appealed to his engineering side. “I think it’s good when an architect understands the handson fabrication of their ideas.”

His brief to the pair was loose: a comfortable pad that was easy to lock up and leave. Initially Spacecraft came back with a tower on the higher side of the site to capture marina views. Tristan rejected this: “I wasn’t game enough.” The second iteration was the opposite: a wedge that turns its back to the sea and street.

The low-key design incorporates an open-plan sitting/dining/ kitchen zone downstairs, back-to-back bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, plus a garage and workshop. When Sarah saw the plans, she loved the small, perfectly formed spaces. “We are used to living in a compact way on boats,” she says. But she liked the idea of a few little luxuries too. “You could say that, with my enthusiasm for the project, we decided to up-spec some fittings.”

The main building materials were Colorsteel cladding and roofing, anodised joinery, heart macrocarpa flooring and a battened rain screen (which blends the home with the bush) in rough-sawn Lawson cypress. “It’s untreated, has a lovely fragrance and deters bugs,” says Sarah. >

In anticipation of moving into their first home, the couple shopped online from their shared berth in staff quarters below deck. They’d snap up end-of-line specials for the custom-designed kitchen – hobs, steam ovens, tapware – and dispatch them to Sarah’s parents.

Builder Richard Hilton-Jones started in September 2015 once the supporting poles were set 3m into the ground. Says Tristan: “We had already added 20 cubes of concrete under the foundations to stabilise the ground.”

The couple were ruggedly involved, from 7am until dark, for six months. “I was oiling, painting, puttying holes, but I also learned how to use power tools and mix concrete,” says Sarah. Tristan, a qualified electrician, installed wiring, devised sensor systems and helped out where he could. “It was a huge learning curve, but I loved it.”

They had just one night in the completed home before Tristan returned to the open seas. Sarah, who has set up a portrait and events photography business, stayed on terra firma with Millie.

They are slowly furnishing the spaces with industrial pieces. But the pair don’t want too much stuff – not yet anyway. A 40sqm extension is planned for when the family expands. Perhaps then Tristan’s eight-weeks-on, eight-weeks-off schedule will change. Meanwhile, he’s happy to get stuck into the to-do list, building walls and fences and planting every time he touches down.

Sarah is forging a landlubber’s lifestyle. “It was a huge transition leaving the boats but I don’t miss the 20-hour days and, although I’ve travelled to some amazing places, there’s nowhere else I could imagine living.”

PHOTOGRAPHS JANE USSHER

THIS PAGE (clockwise from top left) To keep a sense of spaciousness in the bathroom, the vanity and WC is wall-hung and there are no doors on the shower: “It’s like showering in the bush but still very private,” says Sarah. Macrocarpa used for the stair treads was specifically chosen for contrast – a darker grain for the outer plank and lighter on the inner so the steps would be easier to see. At night Millie sleeps in front of the window in the main bedroom so she can keep an eye on her owners and the outdoors; Tristan is sitting on a plywood chair he made for Sarah while he was courting her. The balcony that leads off the main bedroom is well-used both day and night especially by Sarah who, since returning to dry land after years working on super-yachts, has set up a photography business that she runs from a desk in the main bedroom. OPPOSITE Some of Sarah’s photography on the wall of the bedroom with Millie in a starring role; the floors in this room have been whitened with pigmented natural oil.

THIS PAGE (from top) On approach the home looks like a shed, complete with an aluminium door; the David Brown tractor, which Tristan has restored, belonged to Sarah’s grandad: “He bought it in the mid-1970s and I learned to drive on it,” she says. A two-minute stroll from the back door is Tutukaka marina and, just a little further afield, some beaches to play on.