It was just over two years ago when Nadia Lim, her husband Carlos Bagrie and their two children, Bodhi and River, upped sticks from their Auckland home and moved full-time to their 500-hectare farming property just outside of Arrowtown. Looking back, it was not the most inspiring start, the celebrity chef recalls.
“The farmhouse was built in the 1880s and it was so rundown, it was near on uninhabitable,” says Nadia, 35. “It was so bad that Carlos wouldn’t let me walk through the place to see it in its entirety because he was scared that I would say the house was too far gone. Everyone said we should bowl it down – no one wanted to touch the project. But we love bringing old stories back to life.”
Their new home was a hazard, she tells us, with no exaggeration. “When I arrived here with the kids, we didn’t have a floor – there was just concrete and some bare mud in the lounge. There were exposed electrical wires and these massive holes in the lawn that the kids could have fallen into.”
Christmas 2019 was a very simple one, Nadia smiles. With no working kitchen, it was the trusty old Weber barbecue that saved the day. This year, things on the home front are far more established, but the days of cooking an eight to 10-course degustation for the big day are long gone.
This story is from the Christmas 2021 edition of Australian Women’s Weekly NZ.
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This story is from the Christmas 2021 edition of Australian Women’s Weekly NZ.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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