waiheke island
There’s a lot that’s already been said about this magnificent labour of love, leaving us with little more that needs to be said! This article sums it up nicely… Kitchen of the Week: Bali design influence and boatbuilding skills nail it on Waiheke Island… as do these wonderful and very humbling words from the owners of this stunning home…
The Ebullient Boatbuilder
The personality of a home and of the essence of the owners who created it is most evident in the crafting.
The delight is always in the details.
When we came to bring our grand design to life, after many years of travel, several homes, a plethora of influences, and rather too many 'discussions', we went in search of those kindred spirits who we believed really ‘got it’. The quirky specialists who could conceptualise our complex desires and conjure them into something real and marvellous.
We were lucky enough to find one of those magicians in Rhys Mellor – the ebullient boatbuilder and part-time goat herder of Waimauku.
Boatbuilders are the watchmakers of carpentry – used to working in small spaces and pedantic with detail – and that was exactly the kind of precision we wanted.
Our interior designers produced a masterful concept for us but it needed a very special pair of hands to do it justice. The ideas, attention to detail, and effusive enthusiasm we got from Rhys, before he even got the job, made him a shoo-in for the post and blossomed from there on, once he was fully on board.
Ours was a big, complex, and demanding job with very hands-on clients who found building it with Rhys an absolute pleasure from the get-go. We spent a lot of time together whilst he often stayed with us and beavered away late into the night, muttering to himself and eating his meals with a steel ruler.
Rhys always went above and beyond and ensured that we got the highest quality and very best specifications on every aspect of the job. Suppliers such as Blum hold him in the highest regard and rightly so as he makes their products sing.
What he gets done single-handedly is quite phenomenal. He is one man band that plays like an orchestra!
It was a pleasure to work with Love Kitchens and the end result speaks for itself and will forever be our daily pleasure to enjoy.
We could not be happier with what we all achieved together and we are especially pleased that Rhys has become a good friend along the way. We are looking forward to him and his wife Jo coming for lunch very soon.
– Tim and Pauline.
