Between shifts as an Auckland tattoo artist, Keiran Sipes built this Northland home for a woman he’d just met. Mayana and Keiran—who now have two daughters—tell Hana Miller why their labour of love is also their perfect abode
Between shifts as an Auckland tattoo artist, Keiran Sipes built this Northland home for a woman he’d just met. Mayana and Keiran—who now have two daughters—tell Hana Miller why their labour of love is also their perfect abode
Photos by Adam Muir
One of Mayana and Keiran Sipes’s first dates was a road trip to Northland’s rolling hills. Keiran, an artist by trade, had recently purchased 47 acres of bush with dreams of making it his home—and eventually a sustainable community. As he gave Mayana the grand tour of the property, he pointed out where he was planning to build a house.
“Keiran had this crazy idea that he was going to put his house way over there,” says Mayana, pointing into the distance. “He was going to carry everything by hand down the valley and up the other side. I picked a spot and said, ‘This would be a great place for a house,’ and that’s where he started building.”
Mayana had been in New Zealand for exactly one year at the time, having arrived from the US northwest in 2005 in order to fulfil a lifelong curiosity about this idyllic little country in the Pacific. She was looking forward to going home—until she met Keiran, and realised she was already there. “It just felt totally right in my heart.”
Back in Auckland, Keiran had been collecting recycled woods and salvaged building materials. Between shifts at a tattoo shop in town, he made the drive up north as often as he could, sleeping in his van between 16-hour days of construction.
When I visit the house three years later, a silver fern-lined trail leads me through fragrant manuka to a little handcrafted house that looks right at home among the towering totaras. Keiran is still hard at work, now building an extension—single-handedly lifting walls into place and carving meticulous designs into wooden roof beams. I find Mayana further down the path, checking on young macadamia and almond trees, and crops of everything from raspberries to garlic. In her arms is their youngest daughter, Danu, who was born at the house earlier this year. Her one-year-old sister, Billie, is visiting the baby chooks nearby.
“It’s early days yet,” Mayana says, leading me to her beautifully crafted kitchen, where generous windows provide views over a deck to the garden below and the seemingly endless treeline beyond. This is clearly the heart of the home, with Keiran’s labours matched by Mayana’s dedication to growing and preparing the nutritious food that feeds their family.
The kitchen shelves are lined with jars of home-made jams, pickles, chutneys and sauces. A colourful harvest of eggplants, squash, pumpkins, spinach and cherry tomatoes waits on the counter. Nearby, the Heartland woodburning stove warms more than the air. The stove provides hot water and heats the house during winter, playing an essential role in a home that’s otherwise powered by four solar panels.
As romantic as it all sounds, Mayana and Keiran are the first to admit their back-to-basics lifestyle requires an endless amount of hard work.
Keiran has come to think of their home as an “evolving building, built over time so that it grows as our needs grow”. This slow and careful process ensures both efficiency and resourcefulness, which are particularly evident in the property’s sustainable systems, such as the use of rainwater, grey water and the land’s natural slope to supply water to the house and gardens.
“There’s a lot you can speculate about when designing this kind of thing,” says Keiran, “but it’s different to live it. It gives you a better idea of what’s actually required.”
“This life is a million times better than working for a house I never get to be in because I’m out working,” says Mayana, who cherishes teaching her children about the natural world through experience. Keiran grew up in Auckland, where he says “nature was always a secondary thing. We used to have holidays in nature. I want my kids to grow up in nature and realise that nature came first.”
