Love It Or List It NZ host Alex Walls.
Alex Walls has had a busy 12 years.
Her past decade or so has been bookended by appearances on two different reality TV shows – The Block NZ, with husband Corban back in 2014; and in recent weeks, the first iteration of Love It Or List It NZ.
Between the two, she has taken the massive $307,000 she and Corban earned when they won The Block to launch and grow her own high-end homewares business, Alex and Corban Homestore; had two children, Austen and Goldie; and built a house in Birkenhead, on Auckland’s North Shore.
Walls, who has a background in fashion, has a natural affinity for interior design – and having inherited the business nous of her late father, a former Whitcoulls CEO, she was able to leverage their newfound fame into a successful brand.
“The opportunity was there; people knew who we were and that we were good at what we did,” Walls told Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night.
Having started in 2014 as an online store, within a few years A&C Homestore had grown to boast four stores, one “very big” online store, and employs 30 staff.
But Walls’ professional success had come at a personal cost.
Her son Austen was born in September 2016 – just six weeks after A&C Homestore had opened its first physical shop in Mt Eden – and she admits balancing those two major responsibilities was a “shock to the system”.
“It was so hard to be two people… I still was in denial that I was about to become a mother, the most important job of my life,” she told Real Life.
“I had Austen, and the business wasn’t booming yet, but I was really hanging on to trying to be two different people. I was trying to be a career-driven woman and trying to be a mum.
“There’s nothing wrong with being those two people in your life, but I know so many women that really struggle with that mum guilt of not being there for their child all the time or having to drop them off to a nanny or caregiver.”
While she wouldn’t call herself a workaholic, Walls acknowledges she likes to “do things well” – and that can mean pushing herself to her limits.
“I’ve done personality tests in my lifetime and normally it’s about achieving; I create goals and I love to be an achiever.
“A bit of a love language from my parents was them saying ‘Alexandra, you’ve done so well’, and that makes me keep on going,” she told Cowan.
“And so before having children, my goal was career – lets establish a great business. And I worked very, very hard, doing 80-hour weeks sometimes, to make sure I got it right.”
That drive extended to the birth of her first child.
“I was in labour and I was in so much pain. I finally got my epidural… and I was like, ‘Right, Corban, pass me my laptop, I’ve got an EDM [marketing email] to send out.”
As the business grew, so did the demands on Walls’ time – and it all came to a head in 2020.
“I had Goldie, my daughter, and we were forced into Covid lockdown like everybody else. And while we were in lockdown the workload for my business went through the roof,” Walls recalled.
“It just absolutely boomed, and I had an amazing team of about 30 staff who were like family to me, but everyone was on panic central and the demand on me was that I had to prioritise the business over my children, who also were panicked.
“I hated it. I was forced out of maternity leave to get straight back into business and I remember crying [about] having to go back to work instead of being at home with my kids. I saw them drawn to Corban over me – that was not how I wanted it to be.”
By this time, balancing the business with motherhood had become unsustainable – but it was only after a “very extreme” dream one night that she took action.
“In my dream, I was on my deathbed and I said out loud ‘Oh I’m just so, so thankful that I built the most amazing…’ – and then I said ‘business’ instead of ‘family’.
“I was so disappointed. I woke up and I was just horrified that I couldn’t say family, because that was what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t.
“And right there, that’s when Corban and I were like, ‘The business means nothing. Yes it’s been great, but it means nothing if I don’t have a family’.”
Walls sold A&C Homestore in 2022 to focus on being a mum, and says life now is “a lot calmer”. The family is now on the cusp of a move to Ōrewa, north of Auckland, where they are building another house.
While life has quietened down, Walls has recently been thrust back into the spotlight with the release of the first season of Love It Or List It NZ on TVNZ 1.
The show sees her in competition with real estate agent Paul Glover, using her interior design chops to renovate homes that are no longer working for their owners – and convince them to “love it” by staying put, rather than “list it” on the market.
“I listen to what the family needs. They give us a budget – anywhere from $50,000 to $300,000 – and once I know what their problems are in the home, it’s my job to remedy that,” Walls explains.
“So I design, then we project manage it, then style and set it up for a final day that the families walk through and they decide whether I’ve hit the mark for them or whether it hasn’t been good enough and they’re moving on.”
With the series having concluded a week ago, Walls won five out of the six episodes, which she admits took even her by surprise.
“I don’t get to see what Paul takes the families through until the actual episodes have aired, so I’ve been watching them going. ‘Why would you love it? You should have gone and bought that house!’,” she says.
“But I think sometimes I wonder whether I catch the family with emotion. They’ve been living in this house for six, seven, 10 years, and I’ve finally given them what they wanted…
“There’s a lot of weight in it. We spend most of our lives trying to save to be able to own our own pieces of land or a home and then when we finally get in there, it’s pretty heavy. There’s a lot of emotion with that.”
Asked whether a second season of Love It Or List It NZ is on the horizon, Walls says she’s unable to confirm: “We’re waiting to see how NZ has responded to the show, but it seems quite positive,” she says.
Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing, and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7.30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.
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