No-one could accuse Mark Gunton of being indecisive: When his wife got sick of driving miles to the supermarket each week, he built one for her.
This desire to keep her happy was, you could say, the first step on a path ultimately leading to the massive Westgate Town Centre now mushrooming along Auckland's north-western motorway.
Mark Gunton, founder and chairman of Westgate developers the New Zealand Retail Property Group (NZRPG), is not tongue-in-cheek when he says the idea for Westgate came after his wife Geraldine got sick of driving miles to the supermarket.
"In 1988 we were living in Whenuapai," he says, "and for years we had to drive either to Alderman Drive in Henderson or to Glenfield on the North Shore to the nearest supermarket."
At the time work on a planned retail development on land the original Westgate Shopping Centre now sits had never begun and it gave Gunton an idea: He would take over the project himself. By 1997 the deal had gone through, by Christmas 1998 the first shops opened and Westgate was born.
So was Geraldine pleased? Gunton says she should be, pointing out now, 20 years on, there are five supermarkets all within four km of each other in the area, including three at Westgate itself.
As the man behind Westgate, Gunton has led an interesting life. Raised in Glendowie, he left home at 16, did a degree in agricultural commerce at Lincoln University in the 1970s before returning to Auckland in 1984, working as a valuer and dabbling in commercial and industrial property development.
He does not own a home, believing prices in Auckland are "idiotic", and instead lives in a rented apartment. He does, however, own a farm station in the South Island, a property he gets to about once a month, usually spending three or four days rolling up his sleeves and helping out on the farm.
But Westgate takes up most of his time although he did not expect it would turn out that way.
"When we built the original shopping centre, we were quite happy with our 11 hectares," he says. There it might have remained had the old Waitakere City Council not come knocking in 2002 with its plan to create a larger town centre.
"We took on this challenge and it has been quite a journey," Gunton says. "For a start it's taken us 15 years - a third of my working life - just to get planning consent for a town centre the council actually wanted.
"It was never meant to be this hard and it would be easy to say I started it because I believed in the area and took the view this was a good plan. You have to be an eternal optimist when you get out of bed in the morning and don't take any notice of what people say.
"Everybody has an opinion, but I've always had the view the end game is worth the price. The challenge was to design something so it doesn't date or end up looking like yet another shopping centre in California."
Gunton says Westgate needs to become a destination of choice and compete with other centres like Albany and Manukau. He believes it will because of the unique mix of retail, residential, entertainment and commercial precincts being established around a planned design.
"We are creating a city here and I don't want us to settle for mediocrity."
Westgate is not the only project on his plate. NZRPG also own the Milford Centre, where work is beginning on the construction of an extension to the mall and a high-rise apartment complex, and the Highbury Shopping Centre at Birkenhead where plans are under way for a similar development.
Gunton says the next stage for Westgate is the re-development of the original shopping centre. This will include a massive entertainment complex including a multi-level aquatic park and aquarium, an $8.5 million upgrade to the area's main road and, further in the future, high-rise residential apartments.
"We started this back in the 1990s and I would like to be in at the end. When you go for a walk in the bush, you don't stop a few miles in and say this is too hard."