OODLES OF CHARM
BIRKENHEAD POINT
31 Tizard Road
Julie and Peter Collis are both award-winning potters, and the secret to their work/life balance has been keeping clay out of their house.
”Clay travels,” says Julie, lobbing a throw-away line into a conversation about keeping clay out of the house, acting in Hollywood and how clay still shapes their lives.
All things clay have been crafted in their famous Collis Studios, underneath their house, with separate outside access.
Clay has been kept separate elsewhere too. When they extended their 1950s twobedroom cottage, they enlisted their children Sophie and Elliot to help dig the two metre-deep hole for their pool.
Some clay fill was used to sculpt their garden. The rest was carted off site. North Shore clay isn’t worth the effort getting into shape for pottery, says Julie, a teacher and glass artist before she too began winning pottery awards.
Clay led this couple here in August 1981. Peter was working for the company that built the Talisman pottery wheel when the owner Ron Vine, who invented the wheel, invited them to dinner at his home.
Talk turned to Ron’s plans to retire to the Coromandel. Over dessert and a jaw-dropping sunset, Julie and Peter put their hands up to buy 31 Tizard Road.
They built friendships and artistic community connections that reinforced their earliest desire to live here forever.
Working with architect Paul Seton, they built their front deck and studio and then further reconfigured the extended single-level house out to the back deck and pool.
Throughout, their choice of materials and finishes reflect their lifestyle and their artistic sensibilities.
Julie’s tapa-style designs adorn the ochre-tinted concrete floors and the matching marine ply floors where original rimu boards were beyond repair. “The cottage is still there but you can’t see very much of it,” says Julie.
Their kitchen showcases their love of timeless materials including the in situ-polished concrete bench and the corrugated iron ceiling.
Upstairs the main bedroom features the same ceiling. “We can lie in bed and see the reflection of the pool,” says Julie.
This past year spent here wasn’t in Julie and Peter’s plans when they moved to West Hollywood in mid-2019 for Julie’s acting career.
Hard work there landed her the role of a “female starlet” in the current Oscar-nominated movie Mank. Meanwhile Peter was setting himself as a “ceramic artist”, as the Americans call it, and a student mentor.
Covid-19 saw them return a year ago, with a taste for the apartment lifestyle they loved in the US where they will return to as soon as practicable.
In the meanwhile, Peter, a pottery teacher, has set up his studio shared workspace in Ellerslie.
Their studio conversion here into separate, self-contained quarters is among the pre-sale tweaks they’ve made over summer.
“It’s a house with creative energy, lots of light and has lots of break out spaces for intergenerational families,” says Premium’s Trish Love.
Sale: By negotiation Contact: Trish Love, Premium, 021 226 6099; Peter Fitzgibbon, 027 278 9336