Our Place: Brandon Stone

Brandon Stone has called his Mount Maunganui tropical hideaway home for almost 30 years, renovating and landscaping it himself. It is now headquarters for Brandon's adventure tour company On the Wildside

You could say my home is living testimony to my life as a wild traveller.

The rooms are filled with artefacts from my travels - wooden carvings from Papua New Guinea while canoeing down the isolated Sepik River to a clay statue I bought in Tijuana, Mexico after a night of tequila. Stuff from China, Indonesia, Korea, India, Thailand. Syrian rugs cover the wooden floors. An awesome David Trubridge wooden chair is covered with camel blankets from Uzbekistan. On the mantelpiece is a giant tun shell I discovered at Tuhua Island while scuba diving. It's the largest of its kind in New Zealand. I also have a large whale-bone carving of a sperm whale. It was originally confiscated at Auckland airport under the CITES treaty. Ended up here ... don't ask! On the walls there are paintings of whales and dolphins by Aussie artist Kimberley Dodd, plus a monochrome portrait I did at art school. Oh, and the sheepskin cushions - a really wild trip to Briscoes.

I've done the house myself. My father is a landscape architect so I grew up learning how to do things. I've done some cool stuff. I studied visual communications and was director of a corporate theatre company in Hong Kong staging live shows all over the world. Back in New Zealand, I started an adventure tourism company that evolved into charter skippering and I became a PADI Master scuba instructor. I have been film-making with the New Zealand Natural History Unit in the Sub-Antarctic and was a scientific observer for MAF deepsea. My passion for the ocean led to being tutor of marine studies at Bay of Plenty Polytechnic. Recently I have gone back to adventure tourism and being a fulltime photographer.

At my desk I have my iMac and do all my office stuff, as well as all my photography editing. My company, On the Wildside, is all about adventure. We swim with humpback whales in the tropics. The tours to Tonga are pretty busy now so I am away a lot in winter guiding. I started off with local clients and now I take people from all around the world. Recently I planned an adventure trek. It is more than 700km through New Zealand encompassing the nine iconic Great Walk tracks from Stewart to North Island. I will be walking every day and people will join me along the way. I am doing it as a fundraiser to raise funds and awareness for my passion - the protection of marine mammals in New Zealand. I guess doing a lot of things in my life gave me confidence to tackle the house myself. I renovated the house inside and outside. It was built in 1936 and I have owned it for more than 29 years. I planted everything in the garden and now it's an established semi-tropical garden - rare at the Mount. I did all the stonework and mosaics to set off the plants. I like to think of my home showing a part of all my life. Friends are always welcome.