SCHOOL ZONES:
Richmond Rd School, Ponsonby Intermediate, Western Springs College, Auckland Girls’ Grammar.
CONTACT:
Martin Dobson, 021 376 952, Kellands
AUCTION:
On site, March 22, noon.
*Plus 1 off-street park
Former television producer Mike Brockie jokes that in his 23 years with TV3 he must have been the only employee to voluntarily surrender a work carpark.
"Living here was just so incredibly convenient when I was at TV3 that in the end it became more pleasant to cycle or walk to work than to drive," says Mike of the square-fronted Ponsonby villa he bought with his partner Judy Yeoman in 1993.
Judy, a conveyancing solicitor, had been living in Pt Chevalier and Mike was in Northcote Point when they decided to buy somewhere that would be convenient to their work and to Mike's two children who were living and going to school on the North Shore.
So the couple took to their bikes and cycled around Ponsonby's streets for a few months on an intensive search for a home that would suit their needs.
"It had to have a north-facing back yard, three bedrooms so the kids could stay, off-street parking, some old-world character and room for a boat - Mike always comes with a boat," says Judy.
After spending about as much time under the house as inside it to make sure Mike's Okura sailing dinghy would fit, they settled happily on 21 Summer St and bought it pretty much on the spot.
"We loved it straight away, because although it's only about 200m from Ponsonby Rd, it also feels incredibly private and peaceful," says Mike. "We have the quietest neighbours you could ever hope for."
Previous owners had ripped off the 1902 villa's old lean-to structure and extended the back of the house with an open-plan kitchen and dining room that lead straight out to a brick-paved, covered patio with one step up to a level lawn.
The fully-fenced back garden, where the couple were married in 2007, is fringed with mature hibiscus bushes and includes a sunny vegetable patch on one side of the house.
Tucked around the corner from the patio is a small west-facing deck, which is a useful outdoor storage space away from the main garden.
The two main changes Mike and Judy have made have been to landscape the front garden, which now includes an offstreet parking bay as well as the original garage, and to fully renovate the bathroom.
They have also partially re-piled and re-roofed the house, reinforced the basement's ceiling and remodelled the villa's verandah and front steps to maximise its pretty street frontage.
The home's simple configuration includes a classic central hallway with two double bedrooms opening off to the left. The third double bedroom opens to the right of the hallway, which leads into the lounge.
At the end of the hallway, the home's modern extension includes the bathroom, open-plan dining room and kitchen, with a cupboard laundry.
Large windows on the east and west sides of the kitchen and its north-facing french doors ensure that this room gets sun all day.
After living at Summer St for almost 20 years, Mike and Judy have rented the house out to excellent tenants since 2012, when Mike says they both "decided to throw in their careers to go tandem biking".
Since then, their biking adventures have taken them all over the world - riding more than 25,000km in countries including Canada, the United States, Malaysia, Romania, Croatia and in Austria where they cycled the route Judy's father took by foot after escaping from a POW camp in World War II.
They now plan to buy a property within comfortable reach of Auckland and to get back on that tandem bike.
