life & style

Last updated 09:51, March thirty one 2017

The home sits pridefully on a rise, plain lines yet bold.

It’s a beautiful life for a Taranaki duo – quick cars, flash house, big desires. But it hasn’t come effortless, not without some tears, ill health and hard work. Sonja Slinger meets an inspiring duo that can tell a story at every turn of their life.

Nigel Purdie’s face is familiar as he steps from his car and salutes me.

“People either love me or hate me,” he says, climbing out.

The magnificent kauri dining table from the Canterbury Shipping Co.

“It’s my job, I’ve either got good news or bad.”

Nigel has been around Fresh Plymouth for many years as a housing inspector, producing reports for prospective buyers. It’s a job he loves but accepts people don’t always agree with him.

Nigel and Josie love a laugh in the conservatory, a tropical room featuring an island weave ceiling and warm stone granite floors.

“Hell, I’m too old to worry about that.”

He’s a straight talker, cruelly fair and very entertaining. His wifey Josie is a loveable lady, utter of life and totally loving their fresh journey together.

They’ve only been married eighteen months (both 2nd marriages) but have been dating for eight years and their journey so far has been exhilarating.

One side of the greenhouse, looking bright and airy.

They have built a stunning fresh home on an elevated site in rural Taranaki, moved in three years ago and love it all. The views are fantastic either way you look and the house has been designed to capture everything – sea, sun, mountains and unluckily, the wind.

On forty acres, with two lakes and some petite pockets of thicket, Nigel and Josie designed the house, inspired by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, with natural stone walls intercepting linear boards that tower beyond the roofline, concealing the slope of each roof so that the overall picture looks square yet edgy and different, and astounding against a raw setting with its colours of dark grey and green.

The home is four bedrooms, large living and big sheds, not to mention an indoor garden – too windy for any outdoor growing.

The one thousand nine hundred sixty nine Ford Escort just awaiting some makeup and a hot engine.

It is grand, but homely and warm. Those layered pancake sea stones feature inwards and out and provide an aged beauty to the feel of the house. The stones have been sealed to ensure their colouring is maintained and outside there are little testicles of moss commencing to grow among the crevices which is what they dreamed, to provide green soft blobs against the dark grey stone.

“We love it and everywhere there are views,” says Josie. Her kitchen splashback is an elongated window running the entire wall above the kitchen submerge and hob, looking out to Mt Taranaki and the three peaks of Tongariro national park. From the lounge and master bedroom upstairs the views are massive again, over rural land right out to the distant coast and beyond the white cliffs of Tongaporutu.

The dining table is a story in itself. It is the former board room table from South Canterbury Shipping Company, and it’s a fabulous antique kauri beauty straight from the early 1900s boardroom days and seats 16. It sits majestically alongside the kitchen and there have been many a dinner party and wedding around it already.

The conservatory is used often. Doors open on all sides, permitting for use in many weathers.

The garden is plain and effective – planted in hardy, wind tolerant plants – mostly flaxes and mass plantings of an Australian bright green Lomandra lime tuff which borders the bleached kwila courtyard. The real garden is in a 12m x 6m greenhouse – and this is not your average one, let’s be fair.

It’s big, bold and beautiful, fully kitted out with lighting, raised beds and an ample 25,000 litre water tank outside ensuring there are no drought issues. There’s also a cane lounge suite upon entry, just in case you need a little sit down during the gardening proceedings.

“We can’t indeed have a garden up here, the wind is so harsh. So this is our reaction and we just love it,” said Josie with a enormous sneer. “We’ve been known to sit out here at night after a bit of work and sip a wine or two – or three,” adds Nigel.

Glorious Ruby has a sweet powerful engine.

There are flowers, vegetables and fruit and Josie is delighted with her very first growing season, albeit there were a few tragedies, like the corn and beans which never grew – could be too much watering, she thinks. But as a newbe greenhouse grower, she is not letting her losses deter her and she is charging on with fresh plantings.

There are healthy salad greens, brassicas, onions, herbs and potatoes. Draping baskets in the windows dazzle with flowering impatients and bright begonias.

But, where are the cars?

Michael Schumacher has given this bright yellow Ferrari a run.

We head to the shed and photographer Simon O’Connor’s jaw literally drops as the garage door swings opens to expose – a super sleek Ferrari Modena three hundred sixty F1 in sunshine yellow and parked next to it is a devine one thousand nine hundred fifty eight Jaguar XK150 in all her splendour, totally renovated to original glory and aptly named Ruby, for her gorgeous colour.

A moment of muffle passes as we take in the glorious gleaming machines.

“Michael Schumacher drove this baby and he’s even signed his initials on the carbon fibre plate inbetween the front seats,” says Nigel ever so humbly, while gently running his mitt along its sleek sides.

A water feature near the entrance to the home, made from an imported Vietnamese cup and riverstones from the Rangitikei.

The Ferrari was very first shown in Sydney in one thousand nine hundred ninety nine and went on to Melbourne for the Australia Formula one Grand Prix where Schumacher hopped in and took it for a spin around the track. It came to Fresh Zealand in two thousand and Nigel bought it last year from a Christchurch dealer.

And it’s not the very first Ferrari he’s wielded. “Your very first Ferrari is always crimson, ” he says, recalling his Ferrari Testarossa V12, “but the 2nd one never is”.

Nigel sold that in two thousand eight and had been on the hunt for another when he spotted the gleaming yellow beauty.

“I thought he was doing some work down in Christchurch,” recalls Josie. “I had no idea he was buying a car albeit I knew he’d been looking.”

Nigel recalls: “I rang her and said: “I’ve bought something. It’s a black pony.

And she said: “You bought that bloody car, didn’t you?” And, yes, he certainly had.

The Jag is most likely their favourite and while both are special occasion cars, they drive the Jaguar more and most likely because the Ferrari is a bit more precious in terms of driving conditions.

“If we have a fine weekend we go out in one of them but it tends to be Ruby. These cars are like a date car, they are special and we will go out for dinner or lunch in them,” says Josie.

And they draw attention, of course. The Jag more from older people who appreciate her class, while the Ferrari certainly attracts masculine admirers.

They’ve wielded Ruby for three years.

“This model was the very first car to average over one hundred miles per hour in the twenty four hour Le Stud’s race and that’s including for driver switches,” explains Nigel. “She is two hundred ten pony power and she will still do over one hundred miles per hour no trouble at all, albeit Josie doesn’t drive her like that.

“As you get older your reactions slow down but I can go fairly quick in a car,” he says with a sneer.

Josie says they get a lot of joy out of simply wielding the cars, rather than driving them often.

“We could invest in rental property or a bach that we may hardly use but we’ve invested in cars instead.”

And the car story doesn’t end here.

Wielding two gorgeous gleaming beauties isn’t fairly enough to quell Nigel’s motorhead desires. He has one more little project on the go – restoring a one thousand nine hundred sixty nine two door Ford Escort then plonking a fine roaring Twin Cam Lotus engine in her.

“She’s looking rather shabby now, in fact, not unlike an old Waitara High School gf, class of ’65. She just needs a bit of makeup and she’ll be beautiful. ” He has a way with words, this man.

Nigel will not only rebuild this baby, but will have her glammed up and humming with a Twin Cam Lotus engine he’s found in Melbourne but which hailed from Fresh Zealand originally.

“They used to come out with a Twin Cam Lotus for the rallies back in the 60s. Escorts were high spectacle cars in those rallies with a Lotus inwards, they just flew, nobody could catch them.”

He doesn’t plan to race her, just love her and her power, and he might just nudge the speed up a bit now and then when she’s willing and able.

“People told him he’d never find a two door Ford Escort bod let alone a Twin Cam Lotus engine but Nigel didn’t give up and eventually he found both,” said Josie. “He’s canny,” she says. “And persistent.”

But life for these two hasn’t always been this good.

Josie’s journey has been difficult at times, a cracked marriage, cancer and the awful treatment which followed. She had three children to raise on her own and in one thousand nine hundred ninety determined she wasn’t going to sit around and let life get her down. She up and began a fresh career, training as a nurse then got into mental health work and is now a clinical nurse specialist for the assessment and brief care (ABC) team at Base Hospital in Fresh Plymouth, formerly known as the crisis team.

She dabbles in art and has various chunks via the fresh house including one vibrant crimson abstract of Mt Taranaki which is made from surgical cloth from an operating theatre her sister gave her.

Nigel went to Urenui Primary then onto Waitara High School. He left at 15. “I didn’t spend a lot of time at school and didn’t give the teachers much chance to mess with my mind.”

It was one thousand nine hundred sixty five and he landed an apprenticeship with Jones and Sandford as a joiner/builder and worked there for five years before going out on his own. Then in one thousand nine hundred eighty six an chance arose.

It was building a resort in Rarotonga. Back then it was a destination not on many people’s travel plans but Nigel eyed it as a gamble that might pay off so he went.

“The job was a logistical nightmare. We had to get everything shipped in from Fresh Zealand and we had to pay for it before it even left the country so we were in debt before we embarked but we needed the materials there. I was borrowing money on borrowed money. I couldn’t have done it without my accountant’s help, Steve Eichstaedt, a bloody good bloke and a fellow Harley Davidson rider like I used to be.”

He spent ten years in Rarotonga, building the Sunset Resort then managing it.

“We had a most infamous bar, called The Bird Cell. It was the place to be on the island back then. We had one hundred seventy painted parrots on the ceiling and we used to say to people if you can guess how many birds there are up there, we’ll give you free drink. Well, they never could, they kept drinking the beer, kept counting the birds and as the night went on, the numbers became a bit blurred,” he laughs.

He returned to Fresh Zealand and spent the next few years picking up his building work on home turf and carving out a career in building inspections.

He bought a Harley Davidson motorbike and that switched his life because who should he meet also railing a Harley? Josie.

Recovering from cancer treatment and that life-changing illness, she had a fresh zest for life. The Harley was part of her fresh rail on living and she had ventured south to Fresh Plymouth, where she grew up, to rail in a charity Round the Mountain motorbike rail.

“Well, I met her and I couldn’t determine what I liked,” says Nigel. “If was looking at her behind on the bike or if it was her brains.”

The bikes have since gone but their relationship has revved up, into swift cars, fabulous house and ultimately, true happiness.

“In the eight years since Josie and I have been together, she has had a massive effect on my life. (It’s all my affection, beauty and fantasticness” she butts in).

“She has a good sense of humour, she is artistic and I’m not and I can look at something and say I kind of like that, but she can pull it all together and I love that.”

And at 67, Nigel is not anywhere near ready to retire. Indeed, he’s just taken on a fresh job, working at Telfer Youthfull as a building surveying contractor, and loving it.

“Ive never worked in an office before in my life and at sixty seven I’m at retirement age and I can’t believe that, at my age, I’m able to make these switches, learn fresh technology and work with good youthful people. I love my work.

“Josie and I have worked truly hard to get the things that we truly like. You don’t get things you indeed want in life by not working. A lot of people, especially junior generation don’t get that, they expect things these days. You never say can’t – you can.”

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