KEY POINTS:
If you had been standing on a street in central London a few years ago, you might have seen a striking woman in a leather cat suit, riding past on her motorbike. She would have been going pretty fast, and carrying what looked like a professional makeup case
on the back of her Italian bike, a Moto Morini 500.
That spectacular sight was Margita Red. At the time, the hair and makeup artist - who has worked for the likes of Dazed & Confused and Elle magazines and was once hairdresser of the year at the Vidal Sassoon salons in London where she worked - was running her own business. Named Courier Cuts it enabled Red to combine her professional life and her love of classic motorcycles, as she travelled all over London to cut the hair of clients.
It was a fairly glamorous urban European lifestyle for Red, who's originally from Germany, and her partner, Mark Hopkins, a South African who was running his own London bar. But then came the call of the Antipodean wild - she and Hopkins came to New Zealand on holiday.
"And on the way back the plane stopped in Osaka and I remember we were just talking about New Zealand. We decided we liked it so much, we wanted to live there," Red recalls. "So that was our goal. We would save our money and come back."
Red sold the flat she owned in London and bought another. Hopkins redecorated it, and they sold it at a profit. They obtained immigration approval from New Zealand, and within a year, they had moved.
That was five years ago. And clearly, they're not ones to muck about because as Red laughingly tells it, "within four days we had bought two fishing rods, a Land Rover and," she cracks up, "this house."
The house, in Titirangi, was one of the first they saw.
"It was a 1947 yellow, asbestos tile bach. We looked at it, on this spot [by the beach] and I wanted to put in an offer straight away," Red says. "But Mark said no, we haven't had a look at what it's like in the city yet. But as we were driving back into town, I saw the city and I was just like, no, no, turn the car around, I'm going to put an offer in on that house."
They were successful, and Hopkins then took a year off to renovate their new seaside home.
"It just went on all around us," Red explains, "and we lived in room by room as we did up the rest of the house. Looking back now, we learned a lot about how to deal with the council and how to get resource consents and it might have been better to knock the whole thing down and start again, although we would have lost the character."
The house today looks nothing like the yellow bach it once was. It's lined with decks and outdoor living areas, and most of the windows and glass doors slide away, letting the bush and beach scenery inside.
Rooms have been added upstairs and downstairs and it's still not finished, Red says, sliding a glass door in the downstairs bathroom to show what will eventually be a screened outdoor shower with a slate floor.
"It's been good living in an ongoing project," Red says, "because you change your mind so many times as you're doing things. We didn't think of building upstairs, but then Mark climbed on to the roof to change the chimney, saw the view and he said I'm going to have to put a bedroom up here."
One of the last things to be finished was Red's hair and makeup studio. Red remembers that when the couple arrived in Titirangi she wondered how she was going to make a living there.
"We were driving back from Piha and I looked at the houses and wondered what do they all do, the people who live here? There don't seem to be many people, I'm not going to be able to do my work."
But after distributing leaflets around the neighbourhood, Red has developed a loyal client base.
And after several years of having women in foils traipsing through their living room, the pair decided to build a studio on the front lawn. And what a front lawn - the edge of the property is seaside. "We just wanted to use the space and we would have moved the house down here if we could as it's closer to the beach and the views are better."
Instead, Red's clients can drive straight up to her unique salon and look out to the bush and sea as their hair is cut or coloured.
Location, hard work and building skills aside, probably the most fabulous thing about Red and Hopkins' house is the interior.
The couple shipped quite a few of their most precious belongings to New Zealand.
The Coke fridge in the kitchen came from one of Hopkins' bars in London and the black and silver retro-styled barber chairs in Red's studio and the vintage Bunny girl card holder, which was a birthday gift to Red from Hopkins, also came from London.
"It was expensive getting everything here," Red admits, "but I think it's important - you need to have your things around you to feel at home."
The result is a little bit like 50s tiki lounge meets sushi bar meets old wooden hut in the bush. There are collectible bits of retro scattered throughout the house as well as Asian influences, and the whole lot is connected by the wood floors and walls, as well as the slate and stone accents - which also connect back to the exterior environment. It's the sort of mish-mash of decorating genres that shouldn't work but, in this case, makes for a unique, cool and distinctly personal home, as well as being completely appropriate to the Titirangi surroundings.
"Everything just blends well," Red says.
"It feels right mixing everything up - you just have to be subtle about it."
Hopkins, who also decorated the hip bars he ran in London, has seen his home's decorative style prove so popular that he's been able to start his own business, Off Beat Limited.
Says Red: "It just feels so nice to live here. We have Piha 20 minutes away in one direction, and the city 20 minutes away in the other. And Katinka [the couple's three-year-old daughter] is going to grow up in a really nice environment."
