Treasures, if you can call them that, have been known to lurk within, dropped off by friends and neighbours who know the Pakuranga artist’s penchant for recycling.
Used teabags, bottle tops and bread tags — bits and pieces that an untrained eye might see as junk — Melody sees as opportunities to use in her art and innovative, eco-friendly ways to decorate her home.
If the well-known painter is looking for something particular to put in a project, such as plastic bags or wine corks, she puts the word out, sits back and waits.
“I make everything,” she says. “It does give me great pleasure to recycle. I could go out and buy it I guess, but look at all the money I’m saving. People give me all sorts of things, like old wooden boxes and crates.
“I get wee notes now and again with ‘I thought you might like this’. They get such a good feeling from helping me.”
Melody’s artistic bent is evident throughout her home, from the red buttoned love hearts hanging near the bathroom, to her favourite quotes handwritten on her pantry door.
“You can make anything out of inorganics. You can make them classy too,” she says. “You pick up all these things and mostly it’s useless on its own, but when you put them together they serve a purpose. By themselves they look silly, but when you put them in a cluster they look okay.”
Melody describes her décor as “a lot of eclectic pieces put together”, and says wacky combinations are acceptable in her abode because people expect her to be “arty farty”.
Friends don’t bat an eyelid at the walls of the narrow hallway, which are packed to the rafters with framed and canvas art of all shapes and sizes.
“The guy who sold [the easel] to us, his father came from Holland. It was a bit rickety, but we did it.”
Aged drawers beneath the painting hold a collection of old paintbrushes, and carpentry tools that belonged to Melody’s father, who was a carpenter.
Down the hallway and into the bathroom, an old ladder makes an unusual towel rail, while stones serve as handles on the vanity’s cupboard.
“Instead of ordinary handles, I put rocks there. It’s a bathroom, so something to do with the sea is what I like,” says Melody. She’s never been to Italy, but her passion for the country’s architecture, art and sculpture is obvious in the lounge.
The space is laden with creations, including a large painted canvas of Michelangelo’s David, a warrior’s head-dress she made for a wearable arts competition, and a painting of a Valkyrie war maiden.
“I love Michelangelo. I use him as a reference quite a lot,” says Melody.
She’s a Jill of all trades — painter, sculptor and furniture maker — and a born collector. An old stable door has been roughened up, bolted and transformed into a coffee table in the lounge. Mounted on a block of Italian-inspired architecture nearby is an unusual object that has special meaning to Melody.
“She was a lovely lady, very placid and not arty at all. She brought up seven kids and I don’t ever remember mum being angry.”
Using a pair of old shoes as a base, she incorporated some of her mum’s precious keepsakes, earrings and travel souvenirs into a pearly tiled mosaic.
“I plated it and used all of her things on top of it. It’s a memorial piece to remember her by.”
Her mother’s memory is also immortalised in a practical way in the master bedroom. Melody pasted old dress-making patterns together with buttons from her mum’s sewing supplies and patterned serviettes onto a mannequin she found in an inorganic collection.
The doll, which had been in pieces, was patched up, elevated on an old lamplight, and is used to display necklaces.
“All of it is off the inorganic, except my jewellery,” she says.
Melody’s partner Trevor is remarkably comfortable with her quirky decorating tastes and never baulks at her choices.
“He’s so good. I have changed the place around so many times. He never says, ‘oh my god, why did you put that on my wall’. He just gives me free range. Because I’m arty farty, he lets me do it.
“I once painted the kitchen French ultramarine,” she adds, with a laugh. “It was lovely and I loved it. I don’t care what anybody says.
