Living light

Arriving at Pip Kruger and Graham Holmberg’s home, I find them with their two small children and Otto the dog on an oversized wooden day bed. It feels like this family’s whole world could be happily lived just on this small island in their home, with conversations bubbling away and three-year-old Elkie playing while Pip feeds baby sister Tippi.

Pip and Graham are preparing to travel to Thailand for Graham’s work at Enserv Group, a Thailand-based company that focuses on delivering sustainable innovations to improve everyday life. This closeknit family flies to Bangkok together a few times a year, and while Graham works in the realm of renewable energy, Pip spends her days working remotely and exploring her temporary local environments by foot, children in tow.

These trips to Bangkok excite Pip as she not only finds the vibrancy and colour of the streetscapes inspiring, but as an illustrator she’s always exploring the fascinating and unique work of the local artists.

‘I’m concerned about how we will fit more art on our walls when we return home, as there are some incredible artists we’ve visited, and their work is big!’ she says.

Pip’s concern is not due to an overwhelming collection of art in their Aldinga Beach home – a home that’s somehow both a curated splash of colour and a calm zen-style space. Rather it’s because she and Graham made a conscious choice in 2019 to downsize their lives and now live in a compact house. A house free of mantlepiece bling, where the drawers in one of the two bedrooms touch the bed when opened. A house where grandparents are asked to give Christmas gifts that offer an experience or something the children can grow out of, rather than gifts that may create clutter in the small structure. It feels like they’re now happily living the William Morris quote: ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’

Pip and Graham met through friends as young adults after both growing up in the Adelaide Hills. When the time came to buy a house together, they purchased an unrenovated place in Seacliff Park with four bedrooms and a tennis court. ‘Suddenly we found ourselves doing the typical thing – buy your big dream home and then spread yourself thin with an even bigger mortgage and work like hell to pay > it off,’ reflects Pip. ‘When Elkie was born in 2019, Graham was working full time as an accountant. He would leave early when Elkie was still asleep and then come home at night, and she was asleep again. He did that for six months before deciding to resign from fulltime work, with us having no initial plan except that we just wanted to be together all the time and have the flexibility to travel.’

What followed was a purge of two-thirds of their material possessions and a move into their tiny basement for a year while they worked on renovating their ‘dream house’ above them with a goal to sell and become mortgage-free. ‘We really enjoyed living in the basement. I didn’t have an oven for a year, just a small gas burner and a fridge in the shed where we cooked. But we were in heaven and all our belongings boiled down to just the things that we really loved,’ smiles Pip.

As they were in the process of selling what was now a very desirable house, a small yellow-brick cottage came up for sale in Aldinga Beach. The location was ideal for the family, with schools close by and the beach just three blocks away. Its diminutive size was a comfortable fit for Pip and Graham’s vision for their family. ‘Living in that basement for a year amplified what’s important to us and we want to keep home-life small, where we are jostled around the kitchen island everyday with the kids near us,’ declares Pip. >

They moved in at the end of 2021 with Elkie celebrating her third birthday there a few months later.

Pip’s creativity flows from their front gate – designed by Pip and created by Willunga Forge – through the house and out to the backyard where Pip has transformed a once-generic cubby house into a beautiful play-space with her hand-painted designs. Her whimsical creative style reflects the simplicity of everyday life and, cubbies aside, can be seen in the wider world in her line of greeting cards, prints, brooches and textiles as well as in corporate commissions. ‘Pip has a beautiful way of translating our conversations and ideas into images and illustrations,’ says Libby Tozer of ‘She is

Seen’, one of Pip’s regular clients. ‘I found Pip after seeing her handdrawn maps of the Fleurieu and knew she was the person to create a unique logo for my business.’

It seems Pip and Graham have found a way to balance life so that their needs are met, they feel fulfilled and, with less distractions in their lives, they’ve found room to flourish. With the freedom of uncluttered minds, they’ve been developing a distillery set to open early 2023, while running their holiday accommodation ‘The Lobster’ in Normanville – a place to experience simple beach holidays the way they used to be. Work, life and family all coexisting together in that little cottage by the beach.

South Seas Books is an independent bookshop on the Fleurieu’s south coast. South Seas will ignite your imagination.

53 North Terrace, Port Elliot P: 8554 2301 www.southseasbooks.com.au

South Seas Trading offers a selection of vintage art and design pieces · clothing · jewellery · giftware and books in an evolving Arcadian haven. 56 North Terrace, Port Elliot P: 8554 3540