Linda Geor is seventy-five in May and still working full-time from home, which surprises people until they meet her and realise that stopping has never been her default setting.
She logs in each morning after an early walk around the lake, settles into her desk, and moves through the day with the same steadiness she has brought to her career in insurance.
Partner Nigel Edmiston retired before they left Auckland, having spent twenty years as a Vero insurance executive, and most of his life in Torbay, so the idea of moving north was not casual
Their family and long-standing friends were in Auckland, and when you have built decades of routine in one place, you do not discard it lightly. “It was a big decision,” Nigel says. “But one we don’t regret making.”
They had been considering a lifestyle village in a measured way rather than with urgency.
They had seen where Nigel’s mother lived and the kind of life she had there, and it prompted a question about what their own later years might look like. Nigel knew one thing clearly. “We didn’t want to go south where it’s colder,” he says.
So he began looking north, and as he searched, Kerikeri kept surfacing, partly because of the climate, because it seemed to offer a rhythm that felt more aligned with how they wanted to live.
When they first looked at Quail Ridge Country Club online, what caught Nigel’s attention were the gardens, the lake, and the fact that the homes did not appear identical. “They looked individual,” he says. “There were choices, and it felt almost like a resort.”
That description is not about luxury so much as atmosphere. It suggested space and variation rather than uniformity.
They did their due diligence and assessed other retirement villages as part of that research.
At one retirement village, they entered through the gate, saw a row of houses that looked much the same as one another, and did not stay long. “We just kept driving,” Nigel says. What they were responding to was not price or brochure language but a feeling about scale and individuality.
At Quail Ridge, they found old work mates already living there and had not even realised it.
Sitting down with them and asking how they had made their decision proved more persuasive than any marketing material. “We chatted to them about why they chose it,” Linda says. “That made a difference.”
Friends in Auckland raised predictable concerns about healthcare access and distance from major hospitals. Those were not dismissed. They looked into it carefully before deciding to move. “We decided to take the punt,” Nigel says.
In time, real experience replaced perception. “We’ve had lengthy hospital stays,” Linda says. “The medical care here has been very good. There’s an idea that you can’t access proper healthcare up here, but that hasn’t been our experience.”
There were practical requirements from the outset. Linda with four sons, three of them overseas, and Nigel with 4 daughters, they wanted a house that could comfortably accommodate visitors. “We wanted a larger house, and that was non-negotiable,” Linda says.
Quail Ridge identified a site where they could build a four-bedroom home with a generous living area, and because they both enjoy cooking, the kitchen layout mattered. “We knew what we wanted,” they say, and the design reflected that.
Later, when an opportunity arose to move to a home on the lake, the village allowed them to swap. “That flexibility was important,” Nigel says. It reinforced the sense that they were not fitting into a fixed template but shaping something around their own preferences.
Their days now unfold without rigidity. Linda rises early, walks through the village while it is still quiet, then returns home and logs in for work.
Nigel stays up later, sometimes watching the winter Olympics, sleeps longer, and takes on cooking and shopping. He plays snooker, swims, and joins a five-hundred card game each week.
Linda attends ladies’ darts at the weekend, is trialling croquet, walks down the river to the stone cottage, and serves on the residents’ association committee. None of it is compulsory. All of it is available.
“There are about a hundred and ninety residents,” Nigel says. “We’ve made some very good friends.”
The social life is present without being imposed. “You can participate as much or as little as you want,” Linda says. “We don’t go to everything we’re invited to.”
What they notice most, compared with Auckland, is the texture of neighbourliness. In the city, proximity does not always translate into connection. Here, it often does. “You actually know your neighbours,” Nigel says. “And they know you.”
The scale allows for familiarity without intrusion, which is how Linda describes it as feeling more like a neighbourhood than a retirement village.
There are also practical advantages that only become obvious once you live there. As tasks become more physically demanding with age, having people available to assist with small jobs matters.
“There are lots of little things around the house,” Linda says. “As you get older you can’t lift what you used to or put something up in the ceiling, so the Quail Ridge team steps in without fuss.”
Nigel mentions mail being delivered to the door when it is missed and staff bringing wine down from their cellar. “They go beyond,” he says. The staff know residents by name, which in a community of this size is not incidental.
Family life has adapted rather than diminished. “We don’t see our children any less than we did in Auckland,” Linda says, “but the quality of the time is better because they stay here.”
Sons from overseas have lived in the house for short stretches, including one who looked after it while Linda and Nigel travelled. As long as the village is informed, there is flexibility around that.
When asked how they would describe Quail Ridge now, Nigel pauses and chooses his words carefully. “It’s very much like a country club,” he says, by which he means there is space, activity, and choice, rather than regimentation. Linda adds, “You get as much or as little as you want.”
They arrived without rigid expectations and without the sense that they were closing something down. What they found was a place that allowed work to continue, friendships to deepen, family to visit comfortably, and the practical weight of property maintenance to ease. “We have no regrets,” Linda says.
For them, the move north was not about leaving Auckland behind in disappointment or urgency. It was about deciding where they would prefer to live the next part of their lives, and choosing a place that matched that preference.
