- Actor Antonia Prebble sold her Kingsland villa for over $1m to a young couple.
- Prebble bought the house in 2009 for $670,000 after attending 100 open homes.
- She negotiated the sale this month while filming in Queenstown and plans a final farewell to the house.
Outrageous Fortune star Antonia Prebble has sold the blue Auckland villa she bought 16 years ago, just as she was hitting the big time.
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And she could not be more thrilled that the new owners are a young couple, who, she says, are going to love it as much as she has.
The three-bedroom house on Second Avenue, in Kingsland, sold for around its RV of $1.6 million, but the deal wasn’t about the money, Prebble told OneRoof.
“This house means so much to me. I wanted people who could appreciate it for its unique, wonderful characteristics – the feeling it gives you when you’re inside.”
She said the listing agent, Ray White’s Robyn Ellson, told her that the buyers loved the house.
“They really connected with it. I just feel like I can go forward with a clear conscience; that the house is going to people who love it as much as I did,” Prebble said.
Prebble bought the villa on Second Avenue, in Auckland’s Kingsland, when she was 25. She nearly missed the auction due to shooting Outrageous Fortune. Photo / Supplied
Prebble, far right, as Loretta West in Outrageous Fortune. She spent five years on the hit show and also appeared in the prequel, Westside. Photo / TV3
She joked: “I’m sure I’ll drive past Second Avenue many times just to go, ‘Hi little house’. It’s a new kind of stalker, stalking a house as opposed to people.”
Prebble said she negotiated the deal while on location in Queenstown, where she is filming the next season of A Remarkable Way to Die.
“It’s funny. I had to run away from the Outrageous Fortune set to buy the house. This time, I was in the makeup chair, talking to the real estate agent, trying to negotiate this offer.
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“The AD [assistant director] was saying ‘OK, you gotta go now’ and I’m saying, ‘I just need a couple of minutes, I’m selling my house’.”
Prebble said she planned to give the house one final farewell before settlement. “I will just go on my own and spend some time there. Say thank you for all the lovely years,” she told OneRoof.
“It definitely feels bittersweet. I feel nostalgic about it, but it feels like it is the right time to close that chapter and for someone else to enjoy the house.”
The three-bedroom house, which the agents dubbed “the blue house on the hill”, had original wood floors, a fireplace and elevated views of the city and Sky Tower, surrounded by a sheltered garden.
Prebble says she loves the home’s indoor-outdoor flow. Photo / Supplied
The villa has hosted many cast parties. Photo / Supplied
Prebble told OneRoof last month that she bought the house in 2009 for $670,000 after a year of searching.
“I was in no real rush; I wanted to wait for the right thing. I went to 100 open homes, I was a professional open homer at the end of that year,” she said.
“But then I saw the listing in Herald Homes [the New Zealand Herald’s real estate magazine], and I went, ‘That’s my home’. Just from the photo. I waited for the open home, and I completely fell in love with it. After 100 open homes, this one felt right. I just had to buy it. It is so charming, and it has this wonderful feeling to it. It feels like you are breathing out.”
The Wellington-born Prebble told OneRoof she had never planned to be a long-term Auckland resident or homeowner. “When I first moved up to do Outrageous Fortune, I was 20, and I assumed that I would come up to do the show for six months, and then I would go back down to Wellington. I was studying at Victoria University, and I thought I would keep on going with that life,” she said.
The villa’s blue colour struck Prebble and her friend at the same time. Photo / Supplied
“But after I did season one, I just kept getting roles in Auckland, so I stayed and stayed and stayed. And then after a couple of years, I realised that perhaps, maybe I did live in Auckland. I sort of accidentally permanently moved, and then I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should start to look for a house and buy a house’.”
Prebble’s Outrageous Fortune character, Loretta West, was a Westie, through and through, and the TV3 show spent five years in and around Henderson – her “spiritual home”. She said she had initially flatted in New Lynn, and on the advice of the show’s director, she spent considerable time in Pak’nSave Henderson to research her role, but her sights were on inner-Auckland suburbs by the time she came to buy.
Buying at auction proved more difficult than Prebble expected because at the exact time of the auction, Prebble was filming a dining room scene for Outrageous Fortune. The director changed the lunch break so that she could bid over the phone. However, the scene ran late. “It was this family dinner scene. There was always lots of laughter and debauchery,” she said.
Prebble was clock-watching as the scene dragged on and on, fearing she had missed the auction. She ran for the phone as soon as they were finished and connected over a landline just as the auctioneer was finishing the preamble.
“I was thrilled. It was such a grown-up move for me. I was 25. I had never done this before. I didn’t even realise that settlement took a while.”
She did feel guilty, though, that she outbid a couple who were expecting a baby.
Prebble said that the home had hosted numerous cast parties for Outrageous Fortune and later the prequel show Westside, in which she played Rita West, the grandmother of her character on Outrageous Fortune.
“We were filming Outrageous Fortune when I bought the house, so I would often have the cast and crew over, and we would have viewing parties when the show went to air. Pre-streaming obviously. And then I subsequently filmed the first few seasons of Westside there, so again the cast would come over to have pre-drinks before the wrap party, or to watch eps as they came out.”
After she met her now-husband, Dan Musgrove, on the set of Westside, he moved into the Kingsland house. But the couple decided to buy a joint home in nearby Morningside, where they live now with their two boys, aged four and six.
Ellson told OneRoof that “Kingsland is on fire” right now.
She sold two properties on Third Avenue – one for $1.93m and another within three days of hitting the market – to returning expats, and a house on Buchanan Street for just over $1.7m. “It’s interesting, the buyers gravitated to the home they knew was going to work best for them,” she said.
Ellson said she and her team had sold 13 houses in the past two months, with more contracts closing this week, and she was expecting an early start in January, with listings already locked in.
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