A new Taranaki home for an owner whose brief was two phrases, and whose method was to trust the people he chose.
Step in from a Taranaki westerly and Joe Goodin’s home in Hurdon is calm and warm. The radiators have been doing their slow work for hours. Sunlight catches the rendered walls, and timber runs warm underfoot. The brief was straightforward: masculine and grunty, but soft and easy.
The rest Joe handed to interior designer Gina Fabish, who set out to make a home that looks as if it isn’t from here, while feeling like it has always been here.
Joe’s been on this land, five minutes from Ngāmotu/New Plymouth’s centre and looking out towards Taranaki Maunga, for 21 years. He raised his three children in a villa on the site, while a workshop and storage for Vortex International, his deep-sea robotics firm, was added alongside. As managing director he travels regularly for work, so home needed to be a haven to come back to. The cold, draughty villa, added to over decades into incoherence, wasn’t providing that. After watching other friends regret their renovations, Joe decided on a fresh start.
These days it’s just Joe and his 18-year-old son Lenny, who’s in his final year of school, so the house was designed around a floorplan that can expand to accommodate the comings and goings of his daughters Charlotte (26) and Daisy (22).
Joe had discovered Gina’s work online and then bumped into her at a local pub. “I’d seen what Gina and her husband had created at their place,” says Joe. “So when I met her serendipitously it sparked a conversation about working together on the new house.” He hadn’t planned to ask. She hadn’t planned to take it. Both agreed on the spot. He’d brought the same openness to Andrew Crawshaw, the New Plymouth architectural designer who’d drawn the shell, and to builder Gareth Collins who realised it. Joe had never built from scratch before, and admits freely to not knowing what he wanted. “I was really open to just engaging people with experience and for them to tell me what would work.”
What Joe knew was who to trust: Taranaki locals mostly, drawn from his own network. “Instead of being a pain and demanding I want such and such,” he says, “I could tell Gina had a design vision in her head, so was happy to leave it to her to see it through.”
With Irish roots in Cork and ocean-industry work that keeps him moving through northern Europe, Joe brought pieces of his own travels into the house. The Victorian radiators, ordered direct after he visited the Belfast factory himself. The wavy Brazilian tile in the entry, its texture pulling and receding like tide lines, remembered from a hotel on Inchydoney Beach in southern Ireland. The 1700s French oak dining table he’d nearly sold, restored now by Chris Powell of Briwax in New Plymouth alongside antique chairs Gina sourced from down south to match. Small gestures that fold an international life into a home.
Different eras sit alongside each other, curated so carefully you can’t quite tell what came from where. It’s Gina’s design ambition made real: a home that feels accumulated over decades rather than commissioned in a single build. Timbers are layered in deliberate disagreement: cedar ceilings above, wide-plank oak floors below and walnut kitchen cabinetry between. Brass detailing punctuates the scheme, picking up on the patina of antique furniture Gina layers through her interiors. Vintage lighting runs end to end, all dimmable, wired in by Joe’s friend Milton Smith; the quality of the light they brought convinced Gina, a photographer used to shooting rooms with lamps off.
The ground floor reads as one continuous plan: kitchen into dining into living around the stone fireplace, then on to an outdoor entertaining area that’s sheltered from the westerly off the maunga. Off the entry, two bedrooms are quiet — until Charlotte and Daisy come home. In the middle of the house, an open-tread staircase Gina rescued from an enclosed-cupboard plan carries light through both floors. Upstairs holds the main bedroom and Lenny’s, plus a second living space where Joe makes the most of his record collection.
The kitchen carries the strongest single move on the ground floor: an aged-brass rangehood, Gina’s centrepiece, behind a walnut island lit by an industrial vintage pendant she sourced early on and was saving for the right spot. Bentwood stools sit under the counter for morning coffee and end-of-day conversations. Next door, Joe’s table anchors the dining space — the piece the whole ground floor was drawn to accommodate.
The outdoor entertaining area off the main living replaced what was originally drawn as an open fireplace until Joe realised it wouldn’t beat the wind, and Gareth specified the pulldown blinds and auto-close louvres that make it a room usable in any weather. “It’s been a game changer,” says Joe. “We enjoy so much family time out there, which we couldn’t have when it was an open deck.”
A shared language draws the rooms together. “Masculine but soft” became raw timber and stone as a backdrop for layered drapery. It also became the Lochiel plaid Gina used across the main bedroom’s headboard and curtains, a single note of pattern set against all that layered texture. “Grunty, nothing delicate” became lever handles, stone basins and the deliberate roughness of the wide-plank floor.
Underneath all of this sits the engineering. Joe runs the home off a $30,000 waste-oil rig in a separate shed, powering the radiators and hot water from what’s a free byproduct of the business. The house holds its warmth without asking anything of the grid.
Time was the other material. Joe lived in his garage through the build. Lenny worked on it too, through his school’s vocational pathways course. Gina hunted the right vintage pieces, without an eye on the clock. “It feels the way it does because of the time it’s been allowed,” she says. “Imprinted into the house rather than just finished in a flurry.” Outside, landscape designer Mike Mansfield’s naturalistic planting of tussock and natives is establishing around the building, with a living roof to come on the flat-topped upper level.
When asked about his favourite spot, Joe instantly identifies the outdoor room. A space where the finished interior meets a landscape still filling out, and the family gathers whatever the weather. The house was made the same way: given time to become what it needed to be, and still growing into itself.
Words Alice Lines
Photography Gina Fabish
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