Your Place | Ariki Babies

This house has the best colours – not painted on the walls but in the beautiful items it has collected: burgundy shoes on polished wooden floors, dreamy ceramics, potted plants, and flowing silks…

The lounge is one of those weird rooms where the furniture will always get moved around, purely because there just always feels like there must be a better way to maximise space. A little bay window, being just the perfect place to curl up and read, hosts the best light in the house. Looking outside, you’ll find a great big deck, dappled in leaf shapes when the creeping vine blooms in the summer. Generously sized stairs lead you down to a very strange garden in which a large and singular Nikau palm sits right bang-smack in the middle of the lawn – bordered with a little row of bricks. This palm, rendering the yard mostly unusable, instead, forces one to sit on the stairs and stare at the palm for large lengths of time.

The best part? The front deck. We are obsessed with buying villas yet we don’t seem to EVER use the front porch? It is not the dream destination to sit and watch the world go by? To sit in plain view of the street with a wine in hand, feeling the afternoon light turn pink on your cheeks and watching the sun set in the west. Man, you’ve got to love suburbia…

To top it off, the landlords are super lovely and they’ve also conveniently started “Ariki Corner Store” attached to the house. Equipped with the best milkshakes in town and the ability to make an orange and blueberry muffin taste so god damn good – seriously, one of the best kept secrets in town.

‘Ariki Babies’ epitomises what happens to a place when you stick around for long enough to start having nice things; to invest in good sheets, to have your Miss Crabb dresses on display and to tailor your environment to be just how you like it… Because now you have a adult life and you have finally realised that less really is more.

Ariki Babies, photographed by Ophelia King. See the full feature [here]