GREY LYNN OASIS
Swapping apartment living for this villa and its garden has been a divine lifestyle choice for its owner, finds ROBYN WELSH
“Not only is this an easy home to fall in love with, but the locale is superb, close to West Lynn, Westmere, Coxs Bay park and the waterfront.”
Moving up in the world doesn’t necessary mean looking to the heavens for the answers. In Sharon Martin’s case, she turned her attention from her eighth floor central city apartment down to the grassroots options on the city fringes.
“I just wanted to get into a house situation,” she said. “I wanted to bring two cats into my life. I was ready for that new chapter.”
She found it when a friend pointed out this 1920s villa she had seen for sale.
“I thought ‘This is going to be my house. I am having it’. It was quite a fight at the auction but I was determined and it has been fantastic.”
Enter Bella and Paris, her two new cats, and this home has been where their hearts have been very happy since early 2009.
“The house was in very good condition and I didn’t need to do anything to it,” says Sharon. “It was only in the last few years that I felt that the kitchen cabinetry needed replacing, so I decided to redesign that whole space.”
She also replaced the roof, the bathroom vanity and repainted inside and out.
“Other than that, I haven’t needed to do much at all,” she says.
The dark-stained native timber floors, leadlight windows and ceiling roses are original.
The chimney for the shared two back-to-back bedroom fireplaces has long gone but the original fire surrounds have been restored for their decorative-only charm.
Her new kitchen with its marble-look engineered stone benches has the same footprint as the original, with the addition of the low waterfall bench.
Sharon is proud of the adjoining laminated dining table that was her design. Behind it, two bi-fold doors open to reveal her bespoke laundry.
“Coming from an apartment, I wasn’t used to having a dedicated laundry room. It’s a real step up from an apartment to this,” she says.
Bi-fold windows and doors across the back of the house open out to the sheltered courtyard.
“Unless the rain is coming in sideways, this is almost always dry,” she says.
Another favourite spot is her front veranda where she can hunker down with a good book virtually unseen from the street. Says UP Realty’s Lynn Gore “Not only is this an easy home to fall in love with, but the locale is superb, close to West Lynn, Westmere, Coxs Bay park and the waterfront.”
Sharon’s late father Brian loved to potter around in her low maintenance subtropical garden which she loves for the olive and cabbage trees, and the kauri at the front.
“It is a beautiful little oasis,” she says.
”It is fully fenced with an electric gate and it’s totally private. I’ve felt very safe here and that was my priority after coming from an apartment.”
Sharon and her partner Brian Taylor both work in the travel sector but their shift has nothing to do with Covid-19 and everything to do with the larger family home that Sharon has bought for them all in Greenhithe.
Sale: Auction July 8
Contact: Lynn Gore, UP Realty, 0274 734 500