SCHOOL ZONES:
Mercury Bay Area School, Te Rerenga.
CONTACT:
Bev Calder or Sheree Henderson, Bayleys, 027 279 4401 (Bev), or 027 662 9558 (Sheree).
AUCTION:
December 16 (unless sold prior).
*High stud boat garage
Working in investment banking in New York, Kiwi businessman Michael Falconer wanted to secure an idyllic Coromandel beachfront lifestyle for his family, to echo his childhood summers.
Michael says: "There were five kids in my family and when I was a boy our family holidays were often about our parents packing up the car and heading to the Coromandel. My father was very big on diving and fishing."
His wife Kirsten had also grown up enjoying a beachy lifestyle, so in 1999, four years before they moved back from New York they bought a beachfront Opito Bay property sight-unseen.
Emailed photos and the enthusiasm of the friends of the family who'd spotted it for sale and Michael's late father convinced them it was ideal.
"We wanted somewhere brilliant for fishing and boating. And because we'd been away in big cities for years we wanted somewhere a bit more secluded than the mainstream holiday places such as Pauanui and Hahei.
"Opito is a fantastic long sandy bay where you can launch a boat off the beach. It's generally really sheltered and has great clear water for swimming.
"You can go off the beach and get scallops and catch fish right there."
"The section we bought, which originally had a little Lockwood house on it, is right on the beachfront in the middle of the bay.
"It's on a nice elevated site, which allows you to get views from the front of the section all the way to the back of the section."
Michael and Kirsten and children Gus (now 16), Madeline (14) and George (12) holidayed in the Lockwood for several years upon their return before commissioning an upmarket beach house, built in 2010.
"We wanted something really beachy, not just like a city house that's been put at the beach. We wanted it to be well appointed -- for example, it's got a plumbed-in coffee machine -- yet it to also be practical, simple and robust."
Image 1 of 7: There's pretty much nothing but sand between you and the blue sea. Photos / Supplied
Architect Michael O'Sullivan designed two dwellings: a beachfront main house with retractable doors, and a guest house incorporating a high-stud boat shed.
"It's great; you can open the whole house up and it's so relaxing. You just get there and totally decompress from city life. We've had brilliant times there with friends and extended family plus lots of boys' diving trips. And I love Christmas Day at Opito. There are quite often dolphins in the bay and the odd orca.
Michael has an affinity with wood, running Carter Holt's wood products business in New Zealand at the time they built, using Shadowclad pre-primed plywood cladding.
This also features inside, painted white and teamed with white-washed floorboards for a robust Cape Cod-style feeling.
Having sea views from downstairs allows a user-friendly layout. The big front lounge with deck opens right up and steps up to a well-appointed kitchen-dining room harbouring two DishDrawers. This opens to a barbecuing deck, which boardwalks over to the guest house. Under the deck are huge underground water tanks, which handled 15 people staying two weeks.
Upstairs, the main house has a sea-gazing master bedroom with en suite and front deck, plus two bedrooms and a bathroom.
The guest house has a nice sense of separation and a bedroom, bunk-room, bathroom, toilet and deck upstairs.
Downstairs a children's lounge and outdoor shower accompanies the double garage incorporating laundry and storage. Its high-stud bay fits a 6.7m hard-top boat alongside the tractor.
The Falconers no longer have enough free time to justify keeping their beloved beach house as two of their children are now heavily involved in competitive swimming, involving lots of travelling to events.
