Darryl McNamara (left), owner of Aart Model Management and Aart on St Andrew hair salon, and husband David Hollick, head stylist at Aart on St Andrew, live in Dunedin with dog Georgie.
Darryl McNamara, owner of Aart Model Management and Aart on St Andrew hair salon, and husband David Hollick, head stylist at Aart on St Andrew, live in Dunedin with dog Georgie.
The house is one of the original Art Deco homes in the city. When we got it, the previous owners hadn’t done anything with it for 37 years, so it was a chance for us to take everything out and put all the features back
in, but make it a lot more modern. We love the fact that it’s Art Deco, but it’s new.
We’ve been in here a year and a half now.
It’s been a huge changeover because we had to rewire, replaster, re-paint, new kitchen, new everything. We run things pretty efficiently at the salon, and we did the same at home, so we had contractors working on a tight timetable and they had it marked on the walls where they had to be and what they had to do. So they stuck to that and we were in here in eight weeks.
A lot of the really grotty work – stripping the carpets and things like that – we did ourselves, got in there and got our hands dirty. We’ve never done any of that stuff before, so it was definitely a learning curve.
That coffee table was the bargain of the century. Years and years ago in our old home, somebody was going to throw it out. The base on it was a horrible brown colour. We just stripped it back and painted it in matte
black so it suited our house – it’s perfect.
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We spend a lot of time in this room. On the opposite side of the lounge is a massive bay window that looks across the harbour. It’s a nice room to sit back and chill out in, because the sun streams straight in early in the mornings, or when you’re entertaining. It’s also great because it’s a massive room.
Everybody thought it might be hard to heat – to be honest, we were concerned it would be a colder house as well – but we’ve got ceiling and underfloor insulation and the house gets huge amounts of sun in the morning, so it’s not as cold as we thought. Our previous home was a lot smaller and our power bill was twice, if not three, times the size.
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