Kiwis Peter Stewart and Lin Wee have spent more than two decades living and working in Melbourne, Australia, but family, and the attractions of small-town Te Anau are pulling them home.
An opportunity to buy a small lakeside house sight unseen – one that Stewart had admired while on holiday waterskiing as a teenager 40-plus years earlier – is helping to seal the deal.
The smart tech business owners, who run Connected Homes in Australia and New Zealand (but based in Melbourne), were in Queenstown in July last year when the borders closed, leaving them “stuck” in Te Anau, Southland, for four and a half months, staying with Stewart’s parents.
“We sat in Te Anau thinking, What will we do…” Stewart says, “So we wrote a business plan to focus on Engolfed, the golf simulator side of our business.”
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Wee built the golf simulator’s website and they launched it in December last year.
The Engolfed system, which costs $50,000 to $100,000 to install, is a “room of playing golf”, Stewart explains.
It comes with a floor-to-ceiling “impact screen” on which any golf course in the world can be cast, and which is surrounded by padding to catch the real life golf ball hit by the player’s real life clubs. It uses radar and lasers to assess distance, direction, and to give feedback on golfing prowess.
“It collects so much data,” Stewart says. “All of the golf pros have one of these to practise with.”
They realised they could easily manage their business in Australia remotely, while growing their New Zealand business, mainly in the biggest nearby centre, Queenstown.
Wee says their team in Melbourne, which provides home automation and entertainment systems, is small and close-knit.
“They don’t need supervising or managing to complete the work,” Stewart adds. “Our role is to do the marketing and look after clients from an admin and training point of view.”
Stewart says their technical director, Simon D’Arcy-Evans, is “so experienced with internet and networks, it doesn’t matter where in the world we’re installing, he can log in and do the fine-tuning.”
In March last year, Stewart, 59, who grew up in Dipton, Southland, took a call from his mother. “She said, ‘You know that house on the lake you really like? There’s a tiny For Sale sign out front.’
“When we used to come water-skiing as kids, it’s opposite the boat ramp. I always used to look at it and think it would be great to live there. Forty-five years later, it comes up for sale.”
At that time, Covid meant they were locked in Australia, so they ended up buying the house sight unseen.
“The idea was it would be the most perfect spot to build our forever home,” Stewart says. “It had a tiny little house. We looked into the cost of demolishing the house and started to go through the building process.”
But Wee says her ideas on sustainability meant she didn’t want to send the cottage to landfill.
They met two brothers who had bought a vacant block of land in Mossburn, 60km further inland, and sold it to them for $25,000.
While the couple work on their new house plans, which they intend to build to passive house standards, they are staying with Stewart’s parents.
“My parents are getting older,” he says. “They retired off the farm in Dipton 14 years ago, so I want to spend more time with them. They love Lin, and Lin loves them, so it’s a happy family situation.”
Their new home will of course also have all the smart technology their company provides, including fully automated lighting, blinds, security, heating and cooling.
How do they find living in Te Anau, population 2930, compared to Melbourne, population 5.15 million?
“Every time we come over here, I don’t want to go back, so I end up staying longer,” Wee says.
Stewart agrees that Te Anau, known for being the gateway to Fiordland and Milford Sound, is “paradise”. He particularly likes the small community feel.
“Everyone cares for each other,” he says, “Things still happen on a handshake here.”
He gives the example of a work situation in which he was asked to set up security systems for dairy farms.
“I don’t have a warehouse full of cables. The guy in-store at 100% Fiordland Electrical gave me boxes of cables, and said: ‘Just let me know what you use.’ We had to ask him for an invoice [afterwards].
“In Melbourne, no supplier would let you walk out the door with their product.”
The pair are enjoying what nature has to offer in their reclaimed homeland. They like sailing on Lake Te Anau, and have bought a Noelex 25 yacht.
“We like overnighting, fishing, cruising around,” Stewart says. “We also love all the bike tracks; there’s lots of good ones. You can ride from here across to Queenstown, catch the Earnslaw [steamboat] into town.”
Wee, 44, who grew up in Auckland, says she’s always been a “city girl”.
“I’ve just reached a point where I’m wanting to explore more nature hikes, cycle trips and getting out of the concrete jungle.”
They will still spend time in Australia, visiting for perhaps 10 days a month once their Te Anau home is completed next year. Stewart says the commute between Te Anau and Melbourne isn’t difficult: “It doesn’t take much longer than commuting to Auckland.”
“We drive to Queenstown and fly direct to Melbourne. It’s six hours door-to-door,” Stewart says.
And of course, in their Southland home they can also enjoy golf; Stewart has a more established hobby than Wee, who only received her first set of golf clubs two Christmases ago.
But both plan to join the Te Anau Golf Club “now that the sun’s out”. And when Stewart feels like a drive back to his hometown, Dipton, he says there’s a “beautiful little nine-hole course” there.
He says they’ve had some pressure to build a golf simulator in downtown Te Anau, but for now they’re resisting – they’ll have a dedicated room in their new house instead.
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