KEY POINTS:
A computer-generated illustration showing the Paykel home in Parnell, with the proposed development alongside.
An apartment development designed to preserve a heritage home in central Auckland is the way of the future, says its developer, but not everyone is happy.
A preservation battle raged over the Paykel home at 42 St Stephens Ave, Parnell, after the property was bought by development company SMG.
It planned to demolish the 96-year-old house and put four buildings containing 13 luxury apartments on the spacious grounds.
Last year, Otto Properties bought the site from SMG after the Auckland City Council scheduled the house as a category B heritage building, a level of protection that still allows demolition or removal but not without resource consent.
But the council also issued a "certificate of compliance" giving the owner of the property the right to level the home in 2004, valid until 2009.
Otto Properties has come up with a plan to retain the house and some of the grounds by building three apartment complexes with 11 apartments to the west with an underground carpark and retaining more of the grounds than originally intended.
The company will also consider putting a covenant on the home so it would be permanently protected from the wrecker's ball.
At a planning resource consent hearing yesterday, Otto Properties pointed out it had the right to demolish or remove the home because of the certificate of compliance.
Heritage campaigner Elspeth Hardie said Parnell residents still felt a gun was being held to their heads.
"Some people still feel the apartments will detract from the heritage value of the property but the developer is saying, 'If we can't build our buildings, we'll tear the house down'."
In return for preserving the home, Otto Properties wants permission to breach a conservation "view shaft" between the site and the harbour - a breach assessed as "insignificant" by the council's heritage department - and a re-zoning of the site so the home could be used for offices or some other commercial purpose.
A lawyer for Otto Properties, Richard Brabant, said if consent was not granted the home would become "a museum piece".
'It's all sad, and you do get churned up and so on'
Margaret Coutts had lived in the Coolangatta homestead since she and her husband Morton bought it from the Foster family in the early 1950s.
The 95-year-old property at 464 Remuera Rd was demolished last week to make way for apartments.
Mrs Coutts said she was reluctant to leave it to move into a retirement home after her husband, one of the founders of DB Breweries, died two years ago, aged 100.
"You don't leave until it's impossible to stay any longer and you need more care yourself, really. That's the only reason to leave. We didn't sell it until the very end. We would have been better to sell it 10 years ago if we had been sensible, from a health point of view, but we weren't sensible because we liked living there."
Mrs Coutts said she was upset to hear of the demolition.
"It was our home, and our children grew there and it was only when my husband died that I left. It's all sad, and you do get churned up and so on, which one can't help doing. But what can one do, when you're getting old and so on?
"I have no control over the laws of the land. I can't tell the new owners what to do. We did exactly what we wanted when we bought it."
Coolangatta was on the market for a long time and several private parties looked at it. Mrs Coutts thought the 14-storey apartment building next door and the size of the 2500 sq m grounds might have put people off.
"It wasn't in the right place. A large house and a big garden no longer belong in the area, I suppose. There are apartments all along there now.
"That's how every section all the way along the road has gone. It's a fact of life and nothing to do with emotions."
Mrs Coutts said that over the past 15 years, as she watched more and more of the large estates being replaced by apartments, Coolangatta had felt a bit like the last bastion of the Remuera she had grown up in.
"We were there when the original farmhouse was there and the man next door kept sheep and so on. They tore that down for apartments about 15 years ago. We've just seen it change enormously, and destroyed it all."
Mrs Coutts said there was no choice but to leave.
Now she hopes the new development will at least be tasteful.
- Claire Trevett
