Photography by BRUCE NICHOLSON.

ANCIENT KAURI: Mary and Ian Duder in their kitchen featuring 38,000-year-old kauri timber.

A GRACIOUSLY restored villa at the end of a private beachfront road is testimony to the links five generations of one family have retained with their land.

The house sits on the water’s edge at the base of the Whakakaiwhara Peninsula at Umupuia, also known as Duders Beach and it is home to Ian Duder and his wife Mary.

In 1995 Ian sold the 148-hectare family sheep and cattle farm to the Auckland Regional Council which runs it as a regional park.

Sitting on the shoreline in front of the homestead is a large rock hauled there from the farm for a family gathering 20 years ago. On it is a plaque commemorating the original patriarch Thomas Duder. It celebrates his arrival in Auckland from Coromandel and his eventual purchase of the land from Ngai Tai in 1866.

He sent his first son William to farm the land who built a house after he married. But he and his unmarried brother John came to grief after John, a naval volunteer reserve, misappropriated some naval explosives.

They tried out the explosives on a lump of puriri which they wanted to split for fence posts. The explosives turned out to have more power than expected. The house dining room, including a table set with the best china, took the full force of the blast.

Ian’s great-grandmother got a new house as a result – the present villa – which she named Rozel after her family home in Guernsey in the Channel Islands.

The house was built in kauri timber shipped from Great Barrier Island and puriri foundation blocks cut on the peninsula were used. Ian’s grandparents lived in the house until 1953 and had the house foundations re-blocked, a saving grace for he and Mary who came along 40 years ago.

However Ian’s parents, who lived in the house for 13 years, described it as a barn and few improvements were made.

“It was dilapidated when Mary and I moved in,” Ian says. “Mary had a big weep on the first night. With a bit of wind the scrim billowed off the walls like the insides of a big cow breathing. But we slowly worked at it.”

They relined the walls but the original 12-foot stud kauri ceilings remain throughout the living areas.

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RESTORED: The Duder homestead lovingly restored by the fifth generation.

STILL WORKING: This barometer has hung in the same spot in the hallway for close to 100 years.

One concession, however, was to replace the corrugated iron roofing, which was brought to New Zealand by sailing ship, with modern roof tiles because “I felt it looked better”, Ian says.

His grandmother had converted a front bedroom to a lounge. But Ian removed the old-fashioned sash window and replaced it with a landscape window which affords a stunning view to the beach and water just beyond the front fence.

The plate glass window was originally installed in a control tower which the Air Force built on a rocket range on the Duder farm. During World War II it trained two squadrons of Corsair aircraft.

A trainer sat at a special instrument behind the window to advise the pilots of their range from the target and their aircraft angles.

When the Air Force pulled out, Ian’s father brought the window home where it sat in the workshop until Ian and Mary installed it.

The original dining room is now a family room and the hub of the house. Windows from a later era have been installed and a log burner in the old fireplace is the main source of heating for the house – which Ian and Mary admit is chilly in the winter; one of the sacrifices they have made to retain the high ceiling stud.

But, they say, the house is lovely and cool through the hot summer months.

They converted the original lounge to the master bedroom and have retained the kauri bay window. A fireplace was converted to wardrobes and a compact en-suite bathroom is cleverly tucked into a corner of the room.

Three bedrooms off the central hallway have lowered ceilings and the wooden sash windows are replaced with modern aluminium. However carpets have been removed to reveal the original polished kauri floors. Ian stripped the kauri doors of 12 layers of paint, polyurethaned them and put the original handles back on.

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WATER VIEW: Wisteria trailing the verandah rail is spectacular in the spring.

VINYL SOUND: A turntable stereo system built in to a kauri unit in the living room continues to provide "a lovely" sound.

The kitchen – a huge room with a kauri sink bench, a kauri table in the middle and a black iron wood range — and the washhouse with meat safe and copper, survived the demolition of the original house. Ian’s grandparents converted part of the area to a small kitchenette in the mid-1940s.

Two years after they arrived, Ian and Mary remodelled the kitchen and added a dining area to the side which opens onto a patio looking out to the sea view. “Mary was teaching at the time,” Ian says. “The kitchen was gone when she came home and we had opened the walls up.”

“My God I don’t want a kitchen this size,” she exclaimed, which is why the dining area was incorporated. They used formica, the material of the times, for the kitchen fittings.

However, about five years ago they re-modelled the kitchen and dining area with stunning kauri fittings. The kauri came from their son’s farm at Aranga, Northland, and Ian says carbon tests show it is about 38,000 years old.

“Just think of the birth of Christ,” Ian says. “That was yesterday compared with this timber. It’s staggering.”

The kauri casts a quiet glow on the area, down to the inside of the aluminium windows which the joiners clad with the timber.

Mary’s favourite feature is a telescoping pull-out bench which gives additional food preparation space. Ian remembers hams and bacon hanging in muslin bags from the ceiling of the back porch. These days the porch is part of a laundry and bathroom complex and the ancient kauri features again in the bathroom vanity unit and mirror.

Their builder, thinking ahead, recommended building the doorway wide enough for a wheelchair.

That set Ian thinking and he decided that the entire bathroom should be designed for wheelchair access. Hence the luxurious shower is a wheel-in size area and the vanity is set so that a wheelchair can sit underneath.