I’m Ju…and this is where I’m up to.
After 18 years of creative business on and offline (in all sorts of formats), I am happy that Studio Home can morph into being my personal outlet for making, creating and sharing once again.
I’m in my mid-forties and live in beautiful Banks Peninsula, New Zealand with my husband T. We relocated from Christchurch in late 2023 in search of a sea change and a challenge we could take on together. As two self-employed people (T was a brick layer for 35 years), we needed a business to make it all work, and the one on the market was the Akaroa Butchery + Deli. You’d be right in thinking this was a bit of a drastic purchase… it was, and the first 12 months were pretty stressful and challenging (not in the romantic way we hoped ha!).
In just the first few days of our ownership (and the beginning of the frantic busy summer season), I realised there would be no time or energy to continue pursuing my passion for art and writing for now. My third book, “A Guided Discovery of Gardening,” was also released just a few months before our transition, and I didn’t feel I could even give it my usual marketing juice… as there simply wasn't any juice left each week! It had been spent on pressing the wrong buttons on the till in front of customers, working out who to call every time another piece of our equipment broke down, how to manage cashflow and how to navigate the strange psychology behind people’s preferences in sliced ham!
We purchased an ideal property up the Takamatua valley in Autumn 2024.
A 915 m2 section with a smaller, more modern but simple house than the villa we had left in the city. Wide rural views and abundant native birdlife called us home there. Dragging out my treasures and getting art up on the wall really helped temper and balance the demands of work. Instead of a whole room as a studio and one as an office, I nutted out some storage in the corner of the living room with the intention of continuing to at least paint.
I painted one picture that year…
In 2025, with one training wheel off, the butchery became a smoother beast to operate. We had been wrapped up and supported by the lovely local community, and I had found positive emotional rewards (amid this very foreign subject matter!) in creating bonds with regular and new customers alike. But as much as I intended to paint, I felt like I didn’t know where to start, and that effort alone meant I would simply head back outside to do work on transforming our garden. This was a hard task in itself, with large-scale ‘deconstruction’ before the re-planting in our vision could begin. But the planning stirred the creative juices and made me feel like me again.
Over winter, I eched out the odd painting but had also realised that I needed to be “making” more regularly for my own deep-down happiness. It didn’t need to be painting, it just needed to be about finding that lovely “zone” of being fully absorbed in an idea.
Wandering our local bay for shells, lots of standing and staring, noticing this lovely storybook place we had found ourselves in became extra important. I continued to take a lot of photos and more video, I stuck shells to vessels (T was worried about this stage as it went on for a while!), wove wattle fences for the herb garden, drew and re-drew plans for our garden, then dove down rabbit holes for our future renovation indoors. I started scouting out and ordering beads and necklace-making equipment, squinting at YouTube tutorials until I worked things out. I’ve ordered air-dry clay, tools and equipment for lino cut printing and cyanotype paper to experiment with. And by focusing on small-scale landscapes, I’ve managed to paint regularly enough that the process doesn’t make me want to give up completely!
The shop has also provided new opportunities to learn as I sought unique and attractive options to stock alongside our core food offering. Collaborating with Miranda from Ico Traders on a collection of market bags helped me get braver, and I designed and sampled tea towels featuring my past paintings. I printed cards using my photographs of local vistas and have some posters in the wings. The commercial aspects and opportunities of combining my “former life” skills with my new sales and retail ones have really excited me!
And behind all of this recent chapter in our lives is T. The bricklayer who very quickly learned to be a butcher. Making sausages, ham, bacon, cult-level lasagne and more. Ploughing into the “hard scaping” on our property, painting bedrooms, painting butcheries and still more. He has a “can’t stop, won’t stop” attitude which sweeps me along in my many moments of procrastination.
It’s exciting to be learning together and planning for a more balanced lifestyle where we will work and reap the rewards together.
Watch this space!
And thank you for being here.
Ju xo
Writing + photography
Original articles, extracts and photography from my garden books have featured in Homestyle, Shepherdess, Your Home and Garden, Haven, HOME, Latitude and The Design Files.
I also wrote 90 articles with original photography as part of my gardening column for Stuff which featured in prime and regional papers over 1.5 years.
I established Unearthed. - an online subscription-based garden magazine in 2023, before discontinuing it rather quickly to pursue the opportunity of moving and Akaroa Butchery + Deli. This site is now open to browse, but not regularly updated for now.
Previous to 2020, I spent 12 years focused on writing about New Zealand and Australian design and art. Predominantly, on my blog but also for a variety of magazines on both sides of the ditch.
Koa Press has published and distributed three of my books throughout New Zealand, Australia, USA and the UK.
Petal Power 2021
Flowers for Friends 2021
A Guided Discovery of Gardening 2023
I also wrote the creative text for Lost + Found by Zoe Field. Published by Koa Press
