Waiheke: Seduced over lunch

21 Cory Road, 

City folks are suckers for the charms of Waiheke, especially after a long lunch. 

Palm Beach, Waiheke Island. Waiheke Island has its own hazards. Auckland city folks drift over for their long winery lunches, or to bask on the beaches on a weekend getaway. Before you know it, they have fallen in love with the place and bought a home. Let Brett Barclay stand as a warning. 

"It was a long vineyard lunch in 2003, and on my way back to the ferry I drove past this house for sale," says Brett. "I bought it on the spot. I just had to really; north-facing Palm Beach spots just don't come up for sale that often." 

Brett did have an excuse: Waiheke is in his blood. At the turn of last century, large tracts of the island were farmed by his grandparents' family. When the last great uncle died in the 1960s, nobody was interested in remote Waiheke and the old villa and land was sold. But Brett's mother retired to the island in 2001, so the family ties are still there. And he has a busy adventure travel business to run in town, so needed a retreat for himself and his son, Sebastian, now 12. 

The house faces north, so is drenched in sun all day. Walls of glass slide away to open the living room, dining and kitchen to decks and views, but there is a cosy corner tucked by the fireplace for winter retreats when the storms come in. Sebastian has his own zone upstairs - a bathroom and double bedroom with a mezzanine loft for the TV, complete with high-rise windows to glimpse the view. 

Downstairs, Brett enlarged the bedrooms to two self-contained suites of bedroom and bathroom, each with decks and even closer glimpses of the trees. The master shower even has a porthole view of Palm Beach. The guest bedroom has a small lobby room, perfect for guests to put a baby's portacot. Both upstairs and down have white finishes with the odd burst of colour. If new owners want to use the house only part-time, local letting agents are available to manage the property - typically 100 nights' rental can net around $27,000 a year. 

Brett has settled right into the community, enjoying the casual island lifestyle and wandering the tracks down to the beach. His business shirts and city shoes stay in the four-wheel-drive for the ferry back to the city, the laptop opened on the kitchen bar. 

Therein lies the second hazard of Waiheke: you buy a weekender there, and pretty soon you can't stand to climb on that ferry on Monday morning to hit the city. You have a broadband connection so your weekends start to spread from Thursday to Tuesday. Then you fancy a bigger spread, a farmlet where you can start from scratch and really do the lifestyle thing all week. That's Brett's next step. 

"When I bought it, this house was unfinished - the hard stuff had been done, including placing the house on the site to maximise sun and capture the views through the trees," says Brett. "I loved doing the finishing touches, and now I want to do the whole thing again on a bigger lifestyle block. It's addictive." 

So Brett is selling his weekender to move on to a bigger property nearby, having decided he's now an islander, not a tourist.

Vital Statistics:

 

BEDROOMS: 3 

BATHROOMS: 3 

GARAGE: 1 

SIZE: Land 812sq m, house 120sq m. 

PRICE INDICATION: Interest from $700,000. Auction April 1. 

INSPECT: Sat/Sun 11am-noon. 

CONTACT: Richard Lyne or Matthew Smith, Unlimited Potential, ph 522 7384 bus, 021 687 000 (Richard), 021 924 435 (Matthew). 

FEATURES: Five-year-old, two-level corrugated iron house overlooking Palm Beach, north-facing and sun-drenched. Ground floor double bedrooms each with en suite, third bedroom with mezzanine loft. Decks cantilevered over the bush and pohutukawa trees.