Pearson House is at 10 Titoki St, Parnell. The heritage building is part of The Foundation, a new retirement village. Photo / Generus Group
Graham Wilkinson’s national retirement village business Generus Group has spent $17 million restoring and refurbishing a 98-year-old Neo-Georgian-style category one historic Auckland building, re-opened last month.
Parnell’s Pearson House at 10 Titoki St was built in 1926 bordering the Auckland Domain.
Wilkinson said Generus has done it up as the community centre and dining hub of its new under-development $500 million Foundation retirement village.
The red brick building, designed as a home for blind men, was developed as part of the wider Jubilee Institute for the Blind, founded in 1890. That later became known as the Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind, which is now called Blind Low Vision NZ.
The approximately 50 men who once lived in Pearson House were in large dormitories and single rooms on the first floor. Their dining and sitting rooms were on the ground floor.
The building is named after the late publisher Sir Arthur Pearson, founder of Britain’s St Dunstans, a hospital to rehabilitate those injured in World War I. The last resident moved out in 1982 and the building was then leased as commercial premises.
Architectural firm Gummer and Ford designed the Parnell building on the site now owned by Blind Low Vision.
Robin Byron, a senior conservation architect at Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, praised the refurbishment.
“It’s lovely to see Pearson House providing amenities for retirement residents, which is closely related to its original purpose of being a facility for blind returned servicemen after WWI who were once sighted,” she said.
Gummer and Ford was one of this country’s top architectural firms, she noted.
Stewart Harris of Macintosh Harris did the refurbishment’s interior design.
“I imagined how one would journey through the circulation spaces and how that should be an uplifting experience, with bursts of light and colour along the journey,” Harris said.
“This has been achieved with the use of colour, attention to lighting with crystals and chandeliers and furniture inspired by the greats of 18th-century furniture makers. This combined with selected wallcoverings and artworks links the old with the new, creating a collection of the contemporary and the traditional,” Harris said.
Devonport’s Salmond Reed Architects advised on design development and structural upgrading including seismic strengthening.
Seismic work involved removing four chimneys and sending the bricks to Christchurch. There, they were slipped and rebuilt on to lightweight, earthquake-safe chimney frames, freighted back to Auckland and lifted back into place.
Generus did a deal to create a joint venture to lease Blind Low Vision NZ’s Parnell sites.
That has enabled it to build new apartments for its Foundation via Foundation Properties.
This is not the first heritage building Generus has taken on: last decade, it restored Three King’s Ranfurly House veteran’s home in a job which shot from $6m to $10m.
“Lord Ranfurly had built it in about six months and we realised why: there were almost no foundations. Methods of building were less robust in 1903 and we found the woodpiles were not embedded in anything permanent,” Wilkinson said in 2019.
Wilkinson said Pearson House was far more straightforward to restore than Ranfurly House.
At Pearson House, he said plans were detailed and the work was what was expected, even though it was far more expensive than Ranfurly House.
In March, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon opened the first stage of the partly-completed Foundation village in Parnell.
Wilkinson said the Pearson House upgrade involved restoring the original colonnade, linking a drawing room and a reading room and establishing a café on ground level. Upstairs has a boutique cinema, billiard room, lounge, art studio, cardio studio and well-being suite.
Windows were not originally inserted between those front columns, he said and discussions on the building’s restoration centred around whether they should be removed so the front was an open-air entrance way once again.
But Wilkinson said the windows had been in for so many decades that to remove them was seen as an alteration so not in the best interests of heritage conservation.
The $17m bill came from:
Four buildings will eventually comprise The Foundation, of which two have been completed to date:
The Foundation is not due to be finished till 2028 when about 250 people will live there “with development costs approaching $500m”, Generus has said.
The Foundation’s first building, Nathan Residences, was named after members of the Nathan family, who held chairmanships of the Royal Foundation of the Blind. That building opened to residents last October and has 46 apartments on four levels with commercial space at ground level where Blind Low Vision NZ has new premises.
Licences to occupy those apartments ranged from $1.5m to $4m, which Wilkinson said had set a New Zealand retirement price record.
And while other listed retirement operators are selling development sites, only two apartments remain for sale in Nathan Residences.
Generus, wholly owned by Wilkinson, has six retirement villages:
Wilkinson has for some time talked about developing more villages which he has indicated will be in Auckland, but he is yet to announce those deals.
Anne Gibson has been the Herald’s property editor for 24 years, written books and covered property extensively here and overseas.
The financier wants $28.2m; unsecured creditors are listed as being owed another $167,000.