The idea that it would be nice to bring up their three young boys in the country was the start of a serious architectural adventure for Andy and Julie Tyler.
They were living on the North Shore in a very modern house on the water when they made the decision to buy a farm, and for the next three or four years lived in the existing farmhouse that Andy describes as "slightly inferior to the cowshed".
"We were going to build a new house on the farm but then we thought, 'let's rescue an old house'."
The house they found was built around 1880 as a merchant's house in Auckland city. Its lookout tower, fashionable at the time, allowed the early traders and merchants to identify ships coming into Auckland's harbour carrying their goods. Forty years later, the house was bequeathed to the Sisters of Compassion as a convent. In 1998, the church put the house and land up for sale.
When Andy and Julie bought it and arranged to have it transported to their site, it was the biggest house the transport company had ever shifted. It had to be divided into eight pieces, each piece weighing over 30 tonnes.
"We'd wake up each morning and see another piece of house coming over the hill and think, 'What have we done?'," Andy recalls. "In retrospect, it was far too big a project, but we had this vision of a long, tree-lined driveway and the house being suddenly revealed."
Because they wanted all mod-cons, they had the house replumbed, rewired and reroofed, and by the time the restoration was over, it had cost more than $1 million. But the result was something far better than its former glory.
Their first task, after the eight pieces were joined back together, was to create a self-contained apartment within the house where they could live during the project. "My wife likes to remind me, often, that there were orphaned lambs in what is now the kitchen."
The 16 tiny bedrooms used by the nuns became six bedrooms. The house has six bathrooms, two living areas and a formal dining room, and the apartment. The couple added a solar heated, 20m pool, an AstroTurf tennis court, summerhouse and spa, and there's a games room with a full size snooker table, of which the nuns might or might not have approved.
Andy describes it as a wonderfully social house, with living areas opening to decks and garden.
"I love coming home from the city, driving over the hill and seeing it. I love sitting in front of the open fire, and I love walking around the land."
But the three young lads who wanted a life in the country are grown up now, and one is a professional sailor in the UK. "So we're keen to get over there and buy a boat and do some sailing ourselves," Andy says.
