'After I opened my marriage, my friends cut me off. So I did something bold.'

Antonia Murphy was raising three kids, including one with a serious disability, in a small town in New Zealand when her marriage unravelled.

She had "opened" her marriage with her husband, but things got complicated when she fell pregnant with her third child, Matisse. The father? Patrice — Antonia's lover, and later her partner.

The situation exploded when her husband "went and punched him in the nose".

Living in a small town meant everybody knew everybody's business, and the fallout was swift.

"I'm not sure if it's a blessing or a curse how completely non-confrontational Kiwis are, because nobody ever said to my face that they disapproved of what I was doing," Antonia told Holly Wainwright on Mamamia's MID podcast.

"But it did hurt when friends just stopped — like, literally just didn't call back, didn't email back, just cut us dead."

What made things especially painful was how close these same people had previously been to her new partner.

Watch: Antonia Murphy speaks to Holly Wainwright on Mamamia's MID podcast. Post continues after video.

"Patrice had lived in the community a lot longer than I had, and these are people who… he'd cared for their kids over the school holidays… he basically conducted a summer camp at his house and took care of all their kids, and they just cut us out."

As an American living in New Zealand, Antonia found the cultural approach to conflict particularly frustrating.

"Honestly, as an American, I'd rather they'd had a conversation with me, because maybe we could have salvaged some of the friendships. But alas, that was not to be."

But with a full plate of responsibilities, she couldn't waste energy trying to repair these social rifts.

"I think I was so overwhelmed at the time with a new baby and a profoundly disabled child and two businesses and all the rest of it, I wasn't going to go door to door and say, 'Hi, do you still want to be my friend?' I didn't have time for that."

So what does a single mum with three kids do when her community turns its back on her? In Antonia's case, she made the bold decision: she opened an ethical brothel called "The Bach" in the tiny coastal town.

"It turns out, there's this whole online community of anonymous sex workers and people who work in the business who exchange information — everything about what makes a good agency to work at, somebody who protects your rights, to how to stay safe in a booking," she shared.

"And it was they who taught me how to design a place where the women's rights were held at the forefront of everything that we did."

Listen to the full episode of MID below.

Antonia even sent her then-husband on a reconnaissance mission in Auckland to "so-called good brothels or escort agencies".

"He came back and he said, 'Oh my god, it's so depressing. You go into this place, it's sort of lit by these cheesy Christmas lights. There's a vinyl couch that gets wiped off between bookings. There's a lot of glitzy, glammy stuff that's supposed to look elegant and classy, but it just makes me sad.'

"So I thought, 'Oh, I think, I think we could do things that better than that.'"

Sex work is decriminalised in New Zealand, so there was nothing illegal about what she was doing, but that didn't mean there wasn't some judgment, especially with Antonia's already bruised reputation.

"I only felt the judgment when I tried to advertise both for staff or for clients, or when I tried to rent the premises, and I was getting blocked at every point… when the Council tried to give us the boot, that's when I felt the push-back."

Nevertheless, business boomed.

"I've worked out that [the town] had a population of about 80,000 people, of whom, let's say, half were men, and maybe a quarter of those are children.

"So of the 30,000 adult men in town, I had 3,000 names on my work phone. So, judgment or no judgment, they were still ringing that phone."

But despite her unique career move, the mum-of-three says she's just like any other mum.

"I don't think it was really much different from any working mother," she told MID.

"When I'm at work, I'm at work. When I'm home, I'm mumsy."

Feature Image: Instagram/@antoniadreamsup.