KEY POINTS:
39 GOLF ROAD,
EPSOM.
Lorna Ansell is what you would call a glass-half-full kind of woman. For 35 years, she has kept this big five-bedroom home immaculate, tended the garden and raised her three children who have grown up and moved away to successful lives of their own.
Now, at the age of 77, she has decided that this 1923 transitional villa is too big for her to manage on her own and that it's time to be closer to her son and his family in Grey Lynn.
Most widows her age would be thinking about a retirement village or a brick-and-tile unit. Not Lorna. She has bought a villa that pre-dates this home by six years and is already planning structural alterations and changes to its hard-edged, spiky, minimalist garden so that she'll have plenty of cut flowers to fill her crystal vases.
"It took years but I could never find anything that was quite right," she explained of her hunt for a smaller home. Her list of prerequisites included a living room fit for her baby grand piano that she still plays for pleasure. "Oh, that was the first thing I thought of," she says.
Lorna has taught the piano to countless local children and she gave up teaching music theory only two years ago. Many a time, this house has come alive to the sounds of the New Zealand String Quartet, in which daughter Gillian is a viola player, when the quartet is rehearsing for its Auckland performances.
Lorna, her late husband David and their then school-aged children moved here in 1972 as only the third owners of this property. Together, Lorna and David tackled significant renovations, including replacing the scrim walls with modern plasterboard and the fashionable wallpaper and carpet of the day, which is still all in excellent condition. Their new kitchen was extended to enclose an open sun porch that overlooks the garden. The formal dining room is next door, connected to the kitchen by a servery above the bench.
The formal entrance off the front porch has beautiful bungalow-style leadlight windows. It opens to rooms with an enviable combination of a high villa stud and the beautiful architectural detailing that defined the era of the Californian bungalow.
Throughout the house, many of the windows are villa sash windows. There is much built-in storage, including double wardrobes in one of the front bedrooms.
Off the main bedroom there is a separate bathroom, a separate shower room and a separate toilet that also open off the main hallway.
Located on an elevated site, this home keeps company with other large homes that are surrounded by trees and big lawns, established in the days before infill housing.
Lorna's generous lawn surrounds a flat vegetable garden behind her house. A sloping part of her property is a magical woodland adventure with grassed pathways framed by citrus trees close to the house and filled with self-sewn seasonal colour beneath towering palms and mature trees, including a large rimu.
On the high side of her property, beside a standalone single garage, there's a grassed right of way between her boundary and Cornwall Park that gives her privacy from people walking in the park when she's working in the garden.
Hers is a neighbourhood with memories that she says will be hard to leave, such as the cows of Cornwall Park leaning over the fence to nibble her agapanthus.
