We turn a lifetime of memories into a beautifully written, hand-finished book — drawn out over a series of unhurried conversations, in the comfort of your own home here on the Coast.
A keepsake, hand-finished
“The stories we never wrote down
are the ones we lose first.”
The house they grew up in. The work of their hands. The summer that everything changed. These things live in a person, and then, quietly, they go. A life-story book is how a family keeps them: not names and dates on a chart, but the voice, the humour, the whole texture of a life — to be opened by children not yet born.
❖Every Heirloom is a proper book — written with care, designed like a fine memoir, and printed and bound to be handed down. Photographs are restored and woven through the pages. Your family's own words sit alongside the world they lived in, so the story reads like literature, not a list.
One copy stays on the shelf to be read on quiet evenings. Others go to children and grandchildren, near and far.
In the top drawer of the dresser, wrapped in a handkerchief that had once been her mother's, she kept a pair of dancing shoes. The silver had worn to brass at the toe, and the strap had been mended twice with thread that no longer matched. She had carried them through eleven house-moves and two of them across an ocean, past the point where she could still dance, past the point where there was anyone left who remembered her dancing.
Ask her why she kept them and she would wave the question away. But take them out, set them on the table between you, and the whole of 1953 would come back unbidden — the band, the heat of the hall, the boy who would later become the man asleep now in the next room. Some things we keep are not objects at all. They are doorways.
— Heirloom · a daughter's gift to her mother, 2025
The interviews are conducted in person, in the comfort of home, by Caroline — never rushed, and spread across as many gentle sessions as the story needs. All you have to do is talk.
We meet over coffee to understand the life, the family, and what the book should become. No commitment, no cost.
A series of warm, recorded conversations in your own living room, guided by questions and kept entirely comfortable.
We shape the recordings into flowing chapters, research the era, restore the photographs, and design the book.
You review and approve every page. Then it is printed, bound, and delivered — ready to be read and handed down.
Capture their story in their own voice, while every detail is still vivid — a treasure for the whole family to share.
An 80th or 90th birthday, a golden anniversary, a retirement. The gift that says: your life mattered, and we were listening.
A legacy for children and grandchildren not yet old enough to ask the questions — answered, beautifully, in advance.
Every commission is bespoke, so these are starting points — but we believe you should see them. Most of this craft is quoted only “on enquiry”; we'd rather you know where you stand from the very first page. We confirm the right shape, and the final price, after our first conversation.
A focused life, beautifully told.
from $3,900 NZD
The whole life, in full.
from $8,900 NZD
The complete account, archival.
from $18,000 NZD
Additional heirloom-quality copies from $145 each. A deposit secures your place in the year's small number of commissions; the balance is staged across the work.
Heirloom began with a single book — a daughter sitting down with her own father to record his eighty years before they slipped away. What started as one family's keepsake became a calling: to do the same for our neighbours here on the Hibiscus Coast.
Caroline conducts every interview personally, in person. It is deliberately local and deliberately unhurried, because a life story is far too intimate to hand to a stranger, an app, or a call centre on the other side of the world. We take only a handful of commissions at a time, so each one receives the attention it deserves.
“We don't write biographies of the famous. We write them for the people who raised us.”
Heirloom · Whangaparāoa
Tell us a little about the person whose life you'd like to capture. We'll arrange a relaxed, no-obligation first conversation — in person, in your own home across the Hibiscus Coast and North Shore, from Orewa to Gulf Harbour — or by phone if that's easier.
Email — mark@paragondesign.co.nz
By appointment — Whangaparāoa, Hibiscus Coast, Auckland