Family home is a complete corker

There are two slightly odd things you notice when driving up Phil Armstrong and Annie Wills’ rural farm driveway.

First, that’s not a herd of dairy cows grazing their paddocks, but around 40 huge black buffalo. And second, what appears to be an old wooden farmhouse turns out to be a brand new build, still under construction.

As well as its traditional shape and long covered front verandah, what gives it the air of having been there for ever is what it’s built from – the honey-coloured cladding is not wood, or ply, but cork. Hundreds of sheets of it, all shipped from Portugal, where it is harvested as bark from cork oak trees.

Best known for its use as wine bottle stoppers, pinboards and floor tiles, cork also makes an ideal building material. It’s light, waterproof and has incredible insulation properties.

Inveterate traveller Annie had spotted it being used for houses in Portugal and Spain, so suggested using it to Phil, who happens to be a builder, when it came to constructing their dream home in Whangaripo.

Never ones to do anything by halves, though, the couple have not only covered the outside of the house with amber-coloured cork sheets, the inside is completely clad as well – both walls and ceilings are coated with deep, dark Van Dyke brown cork.

The effect is to provide warmth and intimacy in a surprisingly huge interior – two double-storey wings sit either side of a vast 10-metre long open living, dining and kitchen space, with a pitched seven-metre high ceiling.

“It’s more cave than cavernous,” Annie says. “They do this in Europe, but they often lime-wash theirs white.”

She has tried that in just one small entrance hall at the far side of the house, but much prefers the bitter chocolate brown as a backdrop for their eclectic collection of vintage and retro furniture, artworks and keepsakes from overseas adventures.

The addition of regular pops of colours – fuchsia pink rugs and chairs, tribal masks, paintings – glass doors inside and out, plus a giant crystal chandelier in the living area provide literal light relief from the brown, making it more backdrop than main focus.

The couple started the build in 2020, just before covid struck.

“We got a 40ft container-load of 1-metre x 500mm panels from Portugal when it was most expensive to bring anything in, but it was still a lot cheaper than if we’d done GIB and another cladding,” Phil says.

Different thicknesses of cork have been used throughout – 65mm outside, with striped ‘bar code’ 75mm sheets on the sides; 10mm over ply on the inside and 25mm ceiling sheets – and all were easy to work with.

“You put the ply up, spray it, spray the back of the cork and put it up, and that’s all,” Phil says. “Once a room is finished, it’s finished.”

Phil, Annie and their two teenage sons moved into the house before Christmas, having had more than enough of staying in a nearby one-bedroom cottage. Annie’s parents, Chris and Pam Wills, will be joining them as soon as building works in their wing of the house are complete.

The boys will be upstairs, once a spiral staircase has been cut from a massive metal pipe and joined to a metal gantry that spans the central living area.

The stair pipe, as with so much in the house, has been sourced by Annie, who is something of a doyenne when it comes to architectural and industrial salvage. Huge French doors from an old school, massive rimu beams, terracotta tiles, even an old safe are among the many items she has rescued and incorporated into the build.

“You can find anything you want, if you don’t mind waiting,” she says.

Her acquisitions and ideas can sometimes prove challenging for Phil, however, such as when she bought 3000 tiny wall tiles from overseas that needed placing individually.

“He’s already told me if I was his client, he would have fired me by now,” she says.

All the building has been done by Phil, together with son Marin, who is doing an apprenticeship with his Dad. His help has been invaluable, not least since Phil broke his arm badly in November and is only just getting back to full strength.

Meanwhile, as the work continues, Phil and Annie’s other enterprise, the Whangaripo Buffalo Cheese Company, is having a bit of a break – not deliberate, but quite well timed after Phil’s injury.

“The buffalo are having a 12-month sabbatical from milk production – they were obviously not fans of the bull we brought in and they’ve dried off, but we can work around it,” Annie says. “But it does mean there’ll be no cheese for a while.”

She has also just started a post-graduate degree in psychology, while Phil is constructing small portable buildings aimed at people working from home.

But their principal focus remains on completing their unique family home made from Portuguese tree bark.