The white, double-storey villa in a quiet street in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland’s Cox’s Bay looks like something out of a storybook. With its gracious gabled end, ornate trims and balcony with a turned-wood balustrade, it could be a dollhouse. To Lou and Sam Halse, it was the picture-perfect home, where they could fling open the French doors to the capacious back garden and host the very occasions they came back to Aotearoa for.
Lou and Sam are both Aucklanders but had been living overseas for 10 years when, by pure chance,
