Parore wants to bowl $2m home

Coming Down? Adam Parore and Sally Ridge's house in Arthur St, Freemans Bay. Picture / Martin Sykes

Celebrity couple Adam Parore and Sally Ridge want to demolish their home in the inner-city suburb of Freemans Bay - four months after the Auckland City Council introduced new rules to save the area's heritage character.

Mr Parore, who has a mortgage broking business, and Ms Ridge, an interior designer, plan to demolish their large two-storey house at the end of Arthur St and build a new home.

Arthur St largely comprises Victorian and Edwardian homes, including the couple's pre-1920 property with sweeping city views, which Quotable Value figures show sold two years ago for $2.42 million. The house is one of 16,300 zoned residential 1 and 2 houses that the council is trying to protect from the slow creep of modernisation in character suburbs.

The couple could not be reached for comment, but this week's edition of the council publication City Scene said they had applied for resource consent to demolish the house.

The notice said the new house, which is on a 976sq m section, did not comply with the minimum landscape permeable surface controls and maximum paved-impermeable surface controls. It also required consent for earthworks over a slope greater than 5 per cent, excavation covering more than 500sq m and the creation of level building platforms.

The application is one of the first since Mayor Dick Hubbard announced sweeping changes affecting character homes in May. The rules included an end to the demolition or removal of homes without a resource consent.

Gail Morrison, a member of the Herne Bay Peninsula Group, which lobbied the council for greater protection of heritage homes, said she hoped the council would take a stand and turn down the resource consent application in Arthur St.

If not, it would set a dangerous precedent for the new plan change introduced to protect character areas, she said.

The Herne Bay group was set up last year after residents were horrified to learn that two turn-of-the-century villas in Galatea Tce apparently protected in a "character zone" were not protected from removal.

Submissions on the Arthur St application close on October 31. No date has been set for a resource consent hearing.