One Man’s Quest to Reunite With His First Love: A 1971 VW Bug

Locals in Pawleys Island have a special affection for classic vehicles. The coastal South Carolina town is home to many nostalgic retirees, and on weekends its streets see plenty of restored ‘60s-era muscle cars.

Of all the classics motoring past Parlor Doughnuts on Ocean Highway, none has captured the community’s attention like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Volkswagen.

“Everybody in town rubber necks and waves when this Beetle drives by,” says Rev. Wil Keith, a 47-year-old priest. “It’s one of the much-adored cars in our little town right now.”

It is a 1971 red Super Beetle and its story is special.

Jeff Siegrist was a student at the University of Tennessee when he first set eyes on her at a Knoxville dealership.

Siegrist pounced, handing over his father’s old Ford Falcon and $2,278.54 for the Bug. He kicked in $67.45 for an AM radio and $5.95 for a cigarette lighter.

“So that was my car from that day forward,” says Siegrist, an executive search consultant specialising in the forest products industry.

The Beetle was a sales phenomenon and a pop-culture hit that ushered in the era of mass European auto imports. It was also a Hollywood star, thanks to Herbie from the “Love Bug” movie franchise.

Siegrist road-tripped his Beetle all over. When he met his future wife, Mary, he took her on a first date in the red Bug. When the couple had their first child, the baby boy came home in the backseat.

“It was part of the family,” says Siegrist. Mary gave the car its name, around Christmas time in 1972: Rudolph.

The couple had two more children and ultimately sold the car in 1996. “It just wasn’t practical anymore,” he says. “There were tears in my eyes.”

Up to this point, the story isn’t much different from many of the more than 21.5 million original Beetles that Volkswagen sold.

But during the pandemic, things got interesting.

“I kept thinking, ‘Boy, I wish I knew where my old Beetle was,’” says Siegrist. “I wondered whether other people loved it the way my wife and I did.”

Eventually he got serious. He dug up the car’s original bill of sale, which had a vehicle identification number. He had sold the car to someone in Georgia, a quarter century earlier.

So he called the Georgia department of motor vehicles. Turns out the car was still registered and on the road. But that’s all the office would say.

Siegrist got an attorney involved. Two weeks later, the lawyer called with a name and a phone number for a woman he believed to be the current owner. So Siegrist called.

“I was shocked,” says Tracy Swift, who teaches dental hygiene at Albany State University in Georgia. “He started the conversation with, ‘You’re going to find this phone call very weird.’” Swift thought she had a stalker, and recalls Siegrist saying, “I’m not crazy, I promise. Just let me tell you my story.”

Swift did drive a 1971 Beetle. She checked the VIN number and it was a match.

Siegrist traveled to Georgia, met Swift at her office, and drove the car in the parking lot. “I didn’t want to sell the car,” she says, “but because of his story, I felt like it needed to go back to its owner. It was the sweetest story.”

They agreed on a price (he says “many times over the original cost”) and the car showed up on a truck in Siegrist’s driveway days later. It was just before Christmas in 2022.

The first thing Siegrist and his wife did was drive around the block, with tears in their eyes. “Rudolph is back!” his wife yelled as they drove.

Siegrist went digging in a bucket full of coins and junk for a key chain. At the bottom, he found Rudolph’s original key. He didn’t remember saving it.

The Beetle needed restoration. So Siegrist asked advice from someone he trusted. Enter Keith, the rector at Siegrist’s church.

“When you’re at church,” Keith says, “and the service is over and everyone is filing out, that’s when folks share, often, important information about their lives.”

Keith, it turns out, had grown up the son of a car restorer and worked on cars himself in his garage. He was not a professional. He worried if he would have enough time. But a parishioner needed help. How could he say no?

It took about a year. “Aside from the paint and some engine work,” Keith says, “I ended up doing more than I was expecting, with no complaints whatsoever. In some ways, it was like I gained a parishioner. Only it was a car.”

In 2024, Siegrist began driving Rudolph around Pawleys Island. “Rarely can I go anywhere where somebody doesn’t stop me,” he says.

“Because probably 50% of the people of my generation have owned a Beetle or have had an adventure in a Beetle. People want to know the car’s story. So I tell it.”

As for Keith, he says, “It’s a point of pride that I had a hand in it.” Like most classic car stories, this one continues.

“As soon as Jeff stops finding little things for me to fix, then the story will be over,” he says. “But he keeps finding things for me to do! Which I don’t mind one bit.”

Walk through the Australian bush, and you’ll find a green that no paint chart quite captures. Eucalyptus canopy filtered through dust, heat and distance, grey at the edges, sometimes almost silver, never one fixed shade.

For decades, Australian interiors avoided it for exactly that reason. It was much easier to paint the walls white and look at the landscape.

That is no longer the case. Across this year’s Dulux Colour Awards, the celebrated projects shared an unmistakable thread: colour drawn not from trend forecasts or mood boards, but from the ground the buildings stand on.

Bushland greens, harbour blues, valley reds, coastal aquas are a palette with terroir, if such a thing can be said of paint.

“There’s a strong sense that designers are moving beyond safe, uniform schemes and embracing colours that reflect the local Australian landscape,” says Dulux Colour and Design Manager Lauren Treloar.

She points to greyish greens echoing coastal bushland, cool blues that nod to Sydney’s harbourside light, and rust-toned reds pulled from inland, rural country. “These shades feel rich, earthy and versatile.”

White walls, grey stone, maybe navy if a client was game, that was the old formula. Now colour is being used to describe where a house actually is, not just how it looks.

The house that disappears into its garden

Few projects made that argument more persuasively than Nithsdale, an 1890s villa in Stanmore, restored and extended by Studio Prineas as an intergenerational family home.

Once compromised by decades of unsympathetic renovation, the house has been restored to something like coherence, and colour has done much of the heavy lifting.

Architect Rachel Prineas didn’t stop at a front door or a strip of trim.

She drenched the entire exterior in two deep tones, Dulux Bronze Icon and Tambo Tank, pulling render, timber and ironwork into one chromatic field, lifted straight from the native planting around the house, species indigenous to Wangal Country. The building and its garden start to blur into each other.

Judge Ben Peake, Principal at Carter Williamson Architects, called the result mature and sophisticated, praising the discipline behind it: deliberate selections lifted from the immediate native landscape rather than abstracted from it.

The effect is a house that no longer sits in its garden so much as it recedes into it, camouflage as design strategy, and a quietly radical rebuttal to the idea that heritage colour has to mean caution.

The View by Studio Shields. Photo: Martina Gemmola

A valley, painted from the inside out

If Nithsdale shows landscape dictating a single, disciplined hue, The View, this year’s Residential Interior winner, designed by Studio Shields in the treetops of the Yarra Valley, shows what happens when an entire palette is built from the shifting conditions of a single place over time.

Seven years, start to finish. The colour scheme evolved right alongside the build, tones tested on site, adjusted through the seasons, checked against the light as it moved across the valley.

“The palette draws from oxidised earth, eucalyptus canopy, dry grasses and shifting skies, allowing the interior to feel inseparable from the landscape,” says designer Ruby Shields.

Chartreuse and olive pick up the bushland outside the windows. Burgundy and earthy reds anchor the more intimate rooms, echoing soil and aged timber. Powdered electric blues cut through the warmth for clarity.

It is, in Shields’ words, less a single decision than a tonal narrative, unfolding room by room as a considered journey.

Judge Sarah Jane-Pyke, of Arent&Pyke, singled out the precision of that placement, and the cohesion it created, proof, she said, of how thoughtfully deployed colour can enhance the texture of everyday life.

It’s a long way from colour as decoration. Here, it functions closer to memory: a way of encoding a specific valley, its light and its seasons, into the walls of a house.

Waka Huia by Pac Studio. Photo: Simon Wilson

When the landscape is the coastline

Not every project translating “place” into paint sits in the Australian bush.

Te Pākau Maru, a 63-home development on former brownfield sites in New Brighton, Christchurch, took its name, meaning “the sheltering wing,” or “the place of joy”, from a gift by Ven Dr Lyndon Drake, and built its exterior palette around the beach, sea and sky.

What ties Nithsdale, The View and Te Pākau Maru together isn’t a shared shade; it’s a method.

Each project treats its palette as more of a site survey than a style choice, asking what a place already looks like before deciding how a building should be painted.

Treloar sees this as central to where Australian and New Zealand design is heading.

Warm neutrals are doing particularly well in the Australian climate right now, she says, softening rooms without losing their contemporary edge, and sitting easily next to the timber, linen and stone that anchor so many of these projects. The bigger shift, though, is about provenance. Designers can increasingly tell you why a colour belongs in a house, not just that it looks good in it.

There’s a practical lesson in all this for anyone renovating or building right now: skip the trend report. Step outside instead. Look at the ground, the trees, the light at a particular time of day. Ask what the house is already surrounded by.

As these award-winning projects prove, the answer was often there all along; you just have to be willing to bring it inside.

One Man’s Quest to Reunite With His First Love: A 1971 VW Bug

Jeff Siegrist couldn’t take his mind off the car he sold in 1996. So he set out to track it down.

From bushland greens to valley reds, the country’s most awarded designers are proving that the best colour palette was never on a swatch card; it was outside the window all along.

The house that disappears into its garden

A valley, painted from the inside out

When the landscape is the coastline