My Account
Charlie’s Gelato Garden has become one of Matakana’s most popular summer destinations, much to the surprise of the man behind it. He talks to Karyn Scherer about paint, poverty and persistence.
I was born in England, in York. We emigrated to NZ in 1964 when I was six, to Cambridge. My sister was really excited because she imagined living on a sheep station. She always wanted a horse and she got one. My parents still live in Cambridge, but I couldn’t wait to get out of the place.
I met my wife Heather at university. I started off doing engineering but ended up doing chemistry. We did our OE together and sailed a boat around Europe. It was a tiny little boat we bought in London. We had never sailed before but we headed across the Channel and through France and into the Med. It did leak a bit. Halfway across the Channel it started to take on water so we had to turn back, but we fixed it.
When we got back to NZ I decided I was going to be a boatbuilder but that lasted about six weeks because I realised I couldn’t do that and build a boat in my spare time, which is what I really wanted to do. So I went into the paint industry for about six years. I never really liked it much — it was smelly and dirty.
We moved to Auckland and lived in Grey Lynn, and I built a 10m catamaran under the house. It was an old villa so the hallway was perfect for building masts and beams and things. Heather was in the corporate world, sort of in HR, and we decided we wanted to get out of the city and do something different. We started looking up north and kept coming south until we couldn’t really afford it any more. Where we stopped was Matakana. It was 1990 and the country was pretty depressed economically. We found an ex-kiwifruit block. We planted grapes and saved hard to build a house.
We continued to live in Auckland for a couple of years but then our first daughter came along and we had to move into the half-finished house. We didn’t have any internal doors for years and when we finally got the doors we couldn’t afford handles. It was hard yakka but we were quite happy to do it that way and not get into serious debt.
The ice-cream came about because we were growing strawberries. We planted them when the girls were young because Heather wasn’t working and we needed the extra income. It was back-breaking work and I swore I’d never grow strawberries again but after growing calla lilies for nine years hydroponically I decided to change to strawberries at raised height.
We decided we could do strawberry ice-cream as a sideline, but while we were in Italy on holiday we discovered gelato. I don’t know if gelato will ever take off here any more than it has, because people have had bad experiences. It’s the same in Australia, because there is a lot of rubbish in the market — a lot of pre-mix stuff with bright colours and artificial flavours. We decided we wanted to do it the proper way. In Italy it’s called artigianale, which means working from scratch with good ingredients and making everything fresh.
We modeled the whole thing on Rush Munro in Hastings. Heather is from Hawke’s Bay and we were sure it would work here. From the first day it was amazing. We bought two cabinets just to occupy the space but within weeks we filled them. We’ve got about 50 flavours now and it’s growing all the time. We’ve always got new ideas and our customers give us ideas too. I haven’t got a very good palate so I have to pass it on to the taste team to test. Paint and ice-cream are actually quite similar processes. My job is to make sure it’s not too icy, or doesn’t melt too easily, or that it’s not too hard. My favourite flavour is dark chocolate. I worked really hard on it for a long time. Chocolate is not that structurally strong because of the cocoa, and the sugar content is quite delicate. But I think we’ve got it right, if I say so myself.
From time to time we’ve thought about expanding, but we’re just not that way inclined. We’ve always combined the ice-cream with the fruit so I think of myself as a horticulturist as well as a food manufacturer. I love the growing side of it.
We wouldn’t have been able to do what we did without the village taking off, which was about two years before we opened. That was a big help for us in the early days. We’re not that great at self-promotion. Every year we think: “We must enter the NZ Ice-cream Awards”, and we’ve never got around to it. One year we really should do it.
We always try gelato when we travel, although it’s never the reason for going. We’ve taken our girls on overseas trips whenever we can and that’s been fantastic for the family. We’ve got old cars and that sort of thing just so we can go on these trips. We’ve been to China, and France, and Venice and the Amalfi coast, and we chartered a boat in Tonga one year. This year’s trip was New York.
We always do the galleries as well. We’ve both always been interested in art so that’s why we opened the gallery six years ago. We’ve got to know heaps of really interesting people. We’ve had 50 shows there but we’re changing it now. We’d like to have a more permanent setting, and have a lounge area so it’s a bit less formal. We’re also going to concentrate more on three-dimensional work than two-dimensional.
About three years ago, Heather gave up commuting to Auckland after 16 years. We always have a five-year plan that somehow never gets to year four. At some point we’ll ease off the physical things a bit. I’d also like to be able to do a bit more boating. We haven’t done much in the past 10 years, but that’s why we were so drawn to this area in the first place.
For eight months we don’t have a day off. We pick strawberries every day for five months, and table grapes every day for about three months. The ice-cream just keeps rolling on. I swore I’d never be a retailer because of the hours involved. But it’s rewarding in other ways. The ice-cream has been the biggest surprise of our lives, really. Heather and I always liked vegetable gardens and so on, so growing commercially is not that big a jump from everyday life, but ice-cream was a big leap into the dark
