How Kiwi Live: professional skateboarder Elissa's board and plant-riddled Christchurch cottage

Definitely a jungle. I'm trying to cut down the amount of plants. I love plants. I was going to say eclectic skate jungle. Maybe cottagecore is better than eclectic. Yeah, cottagecore skate jungle.

Home is very much a feeling. It's my partner [Miles], it's my cat [Mango] and it's me. I've spent an extended amount of time overseas, but [those places], they don't really feel like home. Home is comfortable and it's where you feel like you can be yourself.

I had an ex-boyfriend who was into crypto. He did a bunch of research on where to invest and I had some spare savings at that point which I threw in as well and it made me enough money for a generously-sized house deposit. Otherwise, I would not have been able to get this place! I don’t want to encourage this because some of the other investments I put money into didn’t do so well so it’s really risky but I got really lucky.

I was bored living on the West side [where I grew up] - it's quite sleepy. After university when I started working I discovered that the Central City is actually quite exciting. I really like St Albans in particular because it's got that old school kind of classic charm, you know, a lot of old cottages, a lot of big, leafy, tree-lined streets.

You reach a point in your life where it gets harder to find good flatmates because a lot of people my age are getting married and having kids so their lifestyle has changed.

I wasn’t actively looking [for a house], it kind of happened by accident. There was just a random little one bedroom in the central city. It was literally a shack. I was like, I could buy this outright and put a tiny home on it. The RV might have only been $80,000 but they were expecting it to go for $120-130k. [Although I didn’t get it] that was my first attempt to own a house. That experience put me in that ‘I'm going to get a house’ mindset. So I started looking around. I came to this place and it was so cute! It was renovated in the nineties so everything's double glazed. And the garden is amazing. I’ve never lived in a weatherboard house before. We grew up in pretty modern houses. I think actually if you look, the original photos that were there when I bought it are still online.

That’s a really hard one. There are so many memories. I don't know if it's my favourite one but one of the most memorable was the first night after receiving the keys. Ray White had put this giant yellow bow on the front door which I pulled off, attached to myself like a cape and ran excitedly around the empty house being like yay, I did it! That was a pretty good memory.

Another good one is two Christmases ago in the garden patio bit where Miles built the pergola, it was the first time we hosted Christmas. Mum and Miles’s parents, who were visiting from Nelson [came over] and we ended up hosting Christmas in the garden. It was a beautiful sunny day and it was really nice to be like, “This is my home, welcome to my home.”

It would either be the garden or the dining area. The garden because there's just heaps of space, it’s like my little oasis. You should see my feijoa tree, it's huge, it's bigger than the garage.

Or it’s what I call the dining room area because that's where all my plants are and that's also where the light comes in. It's probably the most beautiful part of the house because the light makes the wood really glow. I've always liked lying on the floor. In the house that I spent most of my teenage years there was this space behind the couch where the sun would come in and I'd sort of tuck myself in there with a book or the newspaper and then when I was at uni, it would be my textbooks because I can spread out on the floor.

Mango. Does that count? Other than Mango, I don't know. All my boards are replaceable. In 2019, I raced the European circuit and I was away for more than a month, almost two months. I sort of realised during that time how much stuff I don't really need but I really struggle to get rid of things [laughs].

There’s stuff that’s important like some of the boards that I don't skate anymore which are precious. I probably wouldn't think of it at the time, but there are some of the boards that are on the wall, like the very first board that my first boyfriend made for me and I learned to do downhill stuff on it. It's handmade, so that's not something that I could replace, even though it's actually just a wall decoration now. I did the graphic on it. So maybe that's something that I would grab because that is irreplaceable.

My nights usually finish in the lounge because at night it's kind of cosy. I've got a little lamp there which I usually have on a dim light setting to create an atmosphere. I've got a projector, not a TV. It's so good because it's not a big place so how you use the space is really important. I have a friend who's a builder. He helped me make a wooden shelf to hide the projector screen when it's not in use, which fits in with the wooden window frames and everything.

So usually in the evenings we’ll wind down by watching whatever TV series we're into at the moment or some YouTube videos.

There’s not a lot of space for it unfortunately. The intention was to have garden parties with my friends because there's not a lot of space inside. When I had my house warming it was a great night but really crowded. Five people is about the max that I can have over. But the garden! The garden is great.

If I stay in place long term - which I would really like to - it will be due for another renovation. I would extend it out the back. I would have better indoor and outdoor flow to make use of the garden because right now I've got a side door that goes on to the driveway, that’s where all the light comes in. So I would knock down the kitchen and bathroom, extend the house further back and maybe add a second story on the back section because if I have kids at some point, I'm going to need more space.