Malcolm and Peggy Carlaw were not house hunting. They were driving, as they often do, heading toward the golf course and following the road more out of habit than intention when Malcolm noticed homes being built off to the side. “We thought, let’s just go and have a look,” he says. “Something to do.”
They turned in without having seen the sign at the gate and drove slowly through landscaping that caught them off guard. There was a bowling green, a swimming pool, and mature planting that suggested the place had been there far longer than it had. “We were saying, what is this place,” Peggy recalls. “It didn’t look like what we thought a retirement village would look like.”
Eventually they saw a sign for the sales office and decided to stop. Sales manager Glenn Roberts showed them two or three homes, explained what Quail Ridge was, and walked them through the layout of the community.
“We bought the one we’re in now,” Malcolm says, with the ease of someone who recognises that snap decisions are part of his wiring. The house had belonged to the original designer, almost a show home, and it sat down by the lake. “It met our criteria,” Peggy says.
Prior to Quail Ridge Country Club, they were living in Nelson, in an apartment by the river that had seemed right at first but proved smaller than anticipated. “We were moving into something with more square footage,” Malcolm says.
Nelson felt geographically constrained for two people who enjoy exploring the countryside. “You go one way or another,” he says. “Here, you can head off in six different directions.”
With property in the United States, they went back to the US to sell their home there. But even before that, the decision not to return to the United States had crystallised over time, especially after COVID.
As it was, when they did travel back to the US, what stayed with them was the memory of Quail Ridge. “The landscaping really stuck in our minds,” Peggy says. “It felt open, established.”
“Quail Ridge Country Club is different,” Malcolm says. “It’s more around The Lodge, but it doesn’t feel like everything revolves around one activity.” The layout, he notes, could pass for a regular neighbourhood. “If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t necessarily think it was a retirement village.”
What appealed to them was that the house itself felt like a real home. “It’s not a unit,” Peggy says. “It’s a proper house.” It is laid out in a way that could accommodate a caregiver at one end if ever needed, while allowing them to live independently in the other. That possibility sits in the background, not as a plan but as reassurance.
Security, for Peggy, carries particular weight. “The women in my family live a long time,” she says. “My mother lived to a hundred and four.” She does not dwell on it, but the implication is clear. “If I left the door unlocked at night, I wouldn’t feel panicked. I know I’ll be okay if I get old and can’t take care of myself.”
The practical benefits are not abstract. They can lock up and travel without compiling a list of neighbours to check on the property. Lawns are mown. Gardens are maintained. Windows are washed.
“We can leave and know the place will be in fine shape when we come back,” Malcolm says. They take two or three international trips a year and are overdue for another road trip south. “We do travel more now,” Peggy says.
Malcolm and Peggy are serial entrepreneurs by background. Their most recent business helped companies improve sales and customer satisfaction, often in the high tech sector. “We’d teach them how to deal with customers better,” Malcolm says. Sitting at a desk and solving problems is not a habit easily shed. He keeps orchids, pursues photography, and spends time with the Quail Ridge ukulele group and the Bay of Islands Singers.
Peggy volunteers extensively with Rotary, but enjoys time to pursue things she didn’t have time for while working.“When you’re working and something on the computer breaks, you find a workaround,” she says. “Now I can actually fix the problem itself.”
Between the village and the wider Kerikeri community, they can keep their days as full as they wish. Pilates, walking trails that run past Rainbow Falls, swimming, choir rehearsals, ukulele sessions, weekend drives into the surrounding countryside. “You can belong to things,” Peggy says, “or you can not show up, and that’s fine too.”
When they first moved in, they were struck by the hospitality. Offers of invitations arrived quickly. “People are very welcoming,” Malcolm says. Over time, it has settled into something less formal and more like a neighbourhood.
While Peggy and Malcolm were driving around the Quail Ridge village considering their purchase,, they stopped to talk with a woman walking along the road. Within minutes, she invited them over to see her home and talk about life in the village. Some residents arrive knowing nobody in town; others already have established networks. “You can have a life where you just do you,” Peggy says. “If you want instant friend opportunities, they’re there.”
Malcolm is thoughtful about the trade-offs often associated with retirement villages.
“People think you lose control and trade it for safety and convenience,” he says. At Quail Ridge, he feels that balance is handled differently. There is governance around the homes, and certain structural changes are not possible. “You can’t just move a wall,” he says with a shrug. Yet within those parameters, there is leeway in how they live and what they pursue.
“They’re not trying to extract every last dollar out of us,” he says. “It’s a business, of course, but they seem genuinely interested in us having rich and productive lives as we design them.”
As they age, the practical limits of energy and strength are acknowledged. They have seen it in their parents. “We can’t do everything we used to,” Peggy says. “But we can do most of it.”
For Malcolm, independent living means being able to decide what to do and when to do it. “I can do whatever I want when I want to do it,” he says. The support sits in the background, ready but not intrusive.
He is aware that many people still picture retirement villages as institutional, recalling an era of nursing homes that felt clinical and bleak. “Things have changed,” he says. “Boomers have different expectations. We’re more active. We live longer.”
In his view, Quail Ridge represents that shift. “It’s the same life you’d have in a suburb, just with some support.”
Neighbours sometimes describe it as feeling like a resort. Malcolm prefers a simpler term. “It’s a nice neighbourhood,” he says.
At its centre, Peggy adds, is community. “That’s the heart and soul of this place.
