A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE

Space inside 1910 villa isn’t quite what you’d expect, writes Robyn Welsh

From the 1930s Art Deco front door to the 1990s blackboard on the kitchen door, this 1910 villa is a trip down memory lane.

It is original from the front veranda to the beam above the dining table. The rear upstairs and downstairs extensions took shape during mid1990s renovations, followed by rear landscaping in the early 2000s.

Little else has changed since then and that has been fine for Mark Mak and his wife Claire van de Plas, who bought here in 1991 and brought flatmates in to pay the mortgage.

“Let’s not pretend it’s anything more than it is,” says Mark Mak, of the home they have rented out since 2008 when they moved to the US.

The stories are there for the telling from the front door with the flying ducks that people either love or hate, to that blackboard door. “That was for the kitty and who needed to buy what. Then it was for whoever was rostered on to cook and clean,” says Mark

Life was especially vibrant back in this pregentrification, multi-cultural, sociable Pacific Island neighbourhood. “The Pacific Island church marching band would play up and down the street, say, once a month and that was pretty cool,” he recalls.

Amid the first alterations to the rear living area, kitchen/deck, Mark and Claire threw down carpet over the clay in the backyard and held their wedding. When their living area was fully fit-forpurpose, it shone with new timber parquet flooring that was a wedding present from Mark’s father-inlaw, a flooring specialist.

All the rear windows came out of another old villa in Grey Lynn. They include the casement windows from the kitchen bench out to the allweather barbecue deck on the main deck above the double-carport.

Steps off the main deck connect the living area with the garden. The separate downstairs refurbished flat has its own outdoor deck

Looking back at the house from the upstairs deck, Mark recalls plans to enlarge that enclosed deck and square it off with sliding doors on both sides. He had also thought about having that flying duck front door reinstalled between protective laminated glass.

What Mark, a ski instructor, and Claire, a teacher and artist, did do was replace the unsafe lounge brick fireplace with a double-burner open fire place, villa mantelpiece and Victorian tiled surround. “We didn’t want to put in a modern glass box,” says Mark.

On every level, this house has multiple lifestyle options. “It’s like the Tardis. It looks small on the outside and much bigger on the inside” says Mark. LJ Hooker’s Steven Glucina says “It would be impossible to outgrow this monster character villa that is essentially two houses both one on top of the other offering space for everyone and every need.”

It’s the memories that Mark and Claire will miss the most as they settle into their double-storey villa in their US base in Leadville, Colorado.