What are your three favourite things in your home and why are they special to you?
Boon: I’d begin with the courtyard, that has exceeded my expectations. The warmth that it generates, the sun streams in and the peace of just sitting out there where it’s much calmer. The second favourite being in this house for me would be the collectables that I inherited from my parents, the furniture, most of the furniture and the chinese paintings. The third favourite thing here would be the deck in the front, because it sort of brings the bush in yet it’s open space where I can really do my martial arts.
Kim: Definitely the courtyard for me is the pièce de résistance of the whole house. I think secondly coming up the stairs with these three pencil windows, well there not really pencil windows they are too big for that but what I love about coming up the stairs is that you see through these windows, you see the bush and it’s quite open, you then come around the corner of the stairs as you come to the top and your looking out over ocean and beach, so you've gone from the bush, to a rural to a sea view, so just that mixture! Number three actually might seem a bit strange, it’s in the kitchen and it’s sitting at the breakfast bar and the reason I say that again has got to do with what’s going on because in the morning, particularly in summer, the sun rises above the roof of the house and you get sun streaming in from the east on the breakfast bar, so you've got that sun. If you turn around you are looking through pencil windows, these are pencil windows, your looking through pencil windows on to the courtyard, you turn back around you are onto the bush out the kitchen window and then if you turn to the left your looking at the rural view and the sea. So just from that one position in the breakfast bar you're almost experiencing all the different views of New Zealand you could possibly wish for.
What’s your top tip for people wanting to build their own Grand Design?
Kim: Be very careful in your selection of the team of tradesmen that you are going to use, and I think the more time you put into selecting your trades people, the better, and be very clear as to what you want and hope for and expect, and also one of the things that I did that worked very well indeed, was that if you have trades that are somewhat related, try and get a couple of trades people that know each other!
Your build is complete now, what’s next? Do you have any new projects lined up?
Boon: Yes we certainly have projects lined up! It is to launch my feng shui business! My feng shui was an interesting one where it grew organically, I didn’t intend to be a feng shui consultant practitioner, I wanted to study the knowledge from my father, that was it, pure interest! However over 20 years it’s grown organically, informally and it’s all overseas. Now that New Zealand is my home and I promised my father that I would continue his legacy, so this is going to be our launch pad, what better way than to use our own home as a case study to show how traditional feng shui is actually done.