This old Papamoa farmhouse had real character worth preserving, the kind of charm you can’t build from scratch. We had to decide what to keep, what to update, and how to make it suit a young family.
Young families don’t need showpiece homes; they need kitchens that can handle a chaotic Monday morning, living spaces that flow properly, and enough room that everyone isn’t on top of each other. We reconfigured the key living areas to make them work harder for day-to-day life, then built the aesthetic around that foundation.
This is the tricky part of any farmhouse renovation: the original character is the whole point. Strip it back too aggressively, and you end up with a new house that’s just pretending. We were deliberate about keeping elements that gave the home its warmth, ceiling profiles, proportions, and a sense of the building’s age, while modernising the finishes and expanding where more space was genuinely needed.
One area where the original farmhouse was really lacking was the connection to the outdoors. Papamoa’s got great weather, it’s a shame to waste it behind a wall. Creating a stronger indoor-outdoor relationship was a core part of the brief, and one of the more transformative changes to how the home is now.
