Margaret Herron (80) is selling the house she has owned in Wānaka for more than 40 years. Photo / Marjorie Cook
Margaret Herron (80) is selling the house she has owned in Wānaka for more than 40 years. Photo / Marjorie Cook
The last house in Wānaka’s central business district is for sale, after its owner Margaret Herron decided to realise its value and treat herself and her family.
Herron bought the house at 28 Dungarvon St, Wānaka, more than 40 years ago, for $57,500.
The commercially zoned property, built in 1932, now has a rateable value of $3.8 million.
This week, Herron recalled many happy years of living in and operating the Country Lane Bed and Breakfast from the house before making way for other businesses in 1990, and then moving back in again around 2009.
“I arrived in Wānaka three days before Christmas in 1979. With my little car, two little girls aged 4 and 5 and a basket of kittens.”
In 1979, Wānaka had a population of just a few hundred. Everyone knew everyone else.
Herron, formerly of Gore, had a holiday cottage in Hunter Cres at the time but with no school buses running then, she got sick of coming in and out of town to drop her children off at the Wānaka School in Tenby St, and then bring them back into town later for a swim.
She got talking to a real estate agent who showed her around 28 Dungarvon St one Saturday morning in the early 1980s. She bought it that afternoon.
“It was a funny old home but I could see the potential,” Herron said.
“Particularly, it suited my needs of being right in town and two blocks from the school.
The commercially zoned property, built in 1932, now has a rateable value of $3.8 million. Photo / via Property Brokers
“I knew when I bought it I would be extending and altering it, so I engaged a builder ... and he came to me one day and said he had been at the council and we had a problem because it was a commercial zone, and I was going to extend it as a private house [which I could not do] ... So I said, if I had it as a bed and breakfast how would that be? And he said, perfect.”
Towards the end of the ‘80s she was approached by another agent on behalf of three young hairdressers who needed somewhere to set up a salon.
She agreed they could work out of a lounge, and so Partnerz Hairdressing began — later moving into Helwick St.
In the 1990s, Herron decided to move back to Gore and agreed the administrators of the Edgewater Lake Wānaka Hotel and the Pines Hotel could rent the entire premises as offices.
The commercially zoned property, built in 1932, now has a rateable value of $3.8 million. Photo / via Property Brokers
In 1994, young doctors Lucy O’Hagan and Susie Meyers, took on the lease.
By the end of the ‘90s, Herron was back in Wānaka and living in another Hunter Cres house.
Aspiring Medical Centre kept growing and by 2009 it had relocated to the newly built health centre on Cardrona Valley Rd, so Herron moved back in.
“I had been out of the house for ... years and never imagined I would come back to it. I really didn’t. With the doctors taking it over, the kitchen had been removed. I had to start again from scratch,” she said.
Herron has never stopped helping young entrepreneurs — her property’s backyard has long been home to takeaway food businesses, the Coffee Shack and Charlies, which sells crepes from a caravan.
The Work Room interior decorating business also has a small building on her land.
It was originally a laundromat she agreed Ian Ross could build in her vegetable garden about 25 years ago.
While The Work Room would be moving to new premises on Brownston St in July, Herron hoped the purchaser of her house would continue to support the other businesses she has helped get a start.
About 15 years ago, a developer tore down the house next door and built a new commercial building that blocks the sunshine and lake views from what was once her bedroom.
“But that’s what happens when you live in the commercial zone,” she said.
Many people and agents had approached her over the years, asking if she would sell, but she had not been ready to leave her beloved garden of tulips, lilies and roses.
She moved out again about three years ago so her granddaughter and her family could live in the house.
“That makes four generations who have lived in this house,” she said.
