The couple renovating the ‘old pink house’ in Cairns

Renae Kunda’s home is known to Cairns locals as ‘the old pink house’ even though after nine years of renovations and a subdued coat of paint, the nickname no longer applies.

It’s easy to see why it’s stuck, though. In years gone by, the eye-catching colour made the 1928 Queenslander “a bit of a celebrity”; Kunda says the house has appeared in paintings by local artists, in magazines, and even on packaging for sugar.

“If you paint a house bright pink, it gets attention,” she says, laughing.

It was still that colour when Kunda and her husband Roy first saw the place after hearing about it from neighbours, but by then it had lost much of its earlier sparkle; vacant for years and facing demolition, Kunda says that it nevertheless retained an extraordinary appeal.

“I started walking through the house and I was mesmerised by it,” she recalls.

Built with beautiful timbers throughout, tongue and groove flooring, and a deep verandah curving around the upper floor, the Kundas decided on that first visit that “we had to save her”, and arranged relocation to their 70-acre property outside Cairns.

“It was the potential,” Kunda says of the unplanned purchase. “It’s just grand.”

It didn’t hurt that the house was going for just $6000, but that was the beginning of a costly process.

Moving the house involved trucking it down a highway and over bridges, lifting the widest part over road signs along the way. (The circular floor plan meant the house wasn’t cut in half, as is often done.)

Renovations were necessarily slow. “The difficulty is that everything has to be custom,” Kunda explains. Big structural changes were made, including raising the understorey higher so it matched the height of the upper storey – or “putting a big bottom on tiny skinny legs”, as Kunda describes it – leading to some scary moments.

“For the first 12 months we lived here we were up on the legs, and when you walked around you could feel the house shaking, like wobbling. And we had a cyclone that year, and a flood.”

Eventually, two bedrooms were bricked in on the ground level, and lace skirting added to help hide the skinny legs. The upper floor’s layout was significantly altered.

“Every single room in the house has now got a new identity,” Kunda says. “Our kitchen is in an ex-bedroom, our bedroom is the ex-kitchen. We knocked through a kitchenette and en suite, and we joined them together to make a bathroom.”

There’s still more work to be done to the house, but Kunda is up for it.

“Queenslanders are a lifelong project,” she says, and even while unfinished, she finds the house a joy to live in (and work from – the couple run Cape York Motorcycles from the residence).

“We’re up high, it was built beautifully, [with] high ceilings, there’s always a gentle breeze coming through.”

Kunda attributes some of the comfortable vibe to the families who lived there before her. She’s in touch with Josephine Leonardi, whose family lived in the house between 1953 and 2009 (during which it was painted its famous pink), and Licia Signorini Gelsi, who spent her early years in the house until 1946.

“They’re just beautiful people,” Kunda says of the women. “You can just feel that from them, and you can just feel it radiating out of the house.”

Leonardi has shared with Kunda some artists’ paintings of the house that she’s bought at various markets and galleries around Cairns, “all found by chance, and of course when we came across them we had to buy them,” she says.

Leonardi remembers the house being painted pink about 40 years ago “and the colour was a mistake,” she says. “Mum got the wrong colour, but pink it stayed. I really couldn’t see her being any other colour.”

She is grateful she can still pop in to what her family called ‘the grand lady’.

“I was so blessed to have grown up on that property,” she says. “Renae has been amazing in letting us visit.”

The earliest images Kunda has of the house were shared with her by Licia Signorini Gelsi, from when she and her young sisters lived there and their father farmed sugarcane.

Gelsi remembers the front entrance being closed in back then as a music room for the girls, and there was much dancing in the understorey area during school holidays.

“Our family will always be grateful to Renae Kunda for the extraordinary restoration to the house which forever holds beautiful memories,” Gelsi says.

It’s a journey Kunda is grateful to continue. She’s even made sure the famous pink colour lives on, in a way.

“I plant a lot of pink flowers around the house, so that she can keep her pink,” she says.

This article is part of a series on amazing home transformations brought to you by Monarch®, a leading Australian painting accessory company for professional and DIY painters.