- A four-storey mansion in Castor Bay sold for over $20m to a local family.
- The sale was the highest on the North Shore in almost 10 years, attracting local and foreign interest.
- The home, designed by Hulena Architects, features luxury finishes and extensive engineering work.
A four-storey clifftop mansion in Auckland’s Castor Bay has been snapped up by a local family for more than $20 million after attracting a lot of foreign buyer attention.
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The 1400sqm trophy home on Beach Road was built and sold by former UK commercial property developer James Hoseason.
Bayleys listing agent Victoria Bidwell declined to reveal details of the deal, but confirmed that it was the highest North Shore sale in almost 10 years.
“It was bought by an Auckland family, but we had other interested parties too,” Bidwell told OneRoof. “It generated a really good level of interest from both New Zealand and overseas.”
The four-storey home on Beach Road was designed by Hulena Architects and built by renowned Auckland builders Good Brothers. Photo / Supplied
The house and the swimming pool boast views of the Hauraki Gulf. Photo / Supplied
The North Shore’s most expensive home is an Italian-style waterfront mansion on O’Neills Avenue, in Takapuna, which sold for $28.888m in 2017. Last year’s top price was for a luxury home on Blomfield Spa, also in Takapuna, which fetched around $18m.
Hoseason told OneRoof last year that the six-bedroom house was designed by Hulena Architects more than 10 years ago and reckoned it would cost over $30m to build today.
The site had originally been earmarked for a tennis court by the then owners of the house next door, Chrisco millionaires Richard and Ruth Bradley.
Hoseason bought the land in 2010 for $2.475m after emigrating to New Zealand from the UK with his wife, Christina, and their young children.
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“I spent two days with an agent driving up and down East Coast Road. We saw a whole bunch of properties. We kept going past this plot, a flat piece of land with a small garage,” he told OneRoof last year.
“I said, ‘I want to have a look at that bit of land, but I do not want to buy it’. Then we went off on holiday.”
He changed his mind after reviewing Hulena’s feasibility plans. The initial plan was to buy the land to on-sell with the designs at a later date, but the family loved what they saw. “We fell down the magic hole with Brent and this amazing house he’d drawn,” Hoseason told OneRoof.
The Beach Road house has an RV of $23m, but owner James Hoseason says it would cost much more to replace in today’s market. Photo / Supplied
The house is 1400sqm in size. “You could put 60 people in the room, and you would not even think it was busy,” says Hoseason. Photo / Supplied
He was not fazed by the engineering requirements for the clifftop site. Geotech and ground works, including a 22-metre palisade wall and a 10-metre sea wall, took over a year. The above-ground building took another 18 months, but Hoseason said the builders, Good Brothers, were outstanding.
The Hoseasons extended Hulena’s original concepts, adding an office wing on the ground floor and a wing housing the principal bedroom wing. Both wrap around a west-facing grassed courtyard.
Hulena’s design puts the living rooms, kitchen, and swimming pool on the main floor, and additional bedrooms plus two library/reading rooms upstairs. Two more floors are cut into the cliff below, one for the six-car garage, laundry, and plant room, the other for a self-contained guest suite, plus cinema and gym.
The main living room has 260-degree views to the east, from the Waitakere Ranges to Little Barrier Te Hauturu-o-Toi, and, to the west, opens to the sheltered courtyard that gets the evening sun. Luxury finishes such as honed basalt walls and cedar sunscreen louvres, honed and flamed basalt paving, with pale oak flooring inside, balance the rugged stone and showcase the Good Brothers’ workmanship.
The mansion at 29 Minnehaha Avenue, in Auckland’s Takapuna, is on the market looking for a $30m buyer. Photo / Supplied
“The house is massive, so everything is huge. The bench in the kitchen is five metres long. It is a fantastic house for entertaining. You could put 60 people in the room, and you would not even think it was busy,” Hoseason said.
“Because I’m a developer, we were pretty careful about high quality, but not silly,” he said.
“We’re talking about $17,000 per square metre. That’s $24m just for the build. To buy the land is $6m. And that’s before any architect fees. So this is $30m to $32m all day long.”
Bidwell told OneRoof at the end of last year that the property was the most impressive listing for sale in her patch, saying it was “irreplaceable” and “beyond anything else I have seen”.
The North Shore has seen several high-end homes hit the market in recent months. Precision real estate agent Andrew Doreen has two properties that could give the Beach Road property a run for its money.
The first is a Hamptons-style mansion at 29 Minnehaha Avenue. The waterfront home between Takapuna and Milford beaches has just undergone a luxury makeover overseen by top architect Jack McKinney, where, Dorreen said, there were no limits on budget.
He also has beachfront pad at 7 Rarere Road, which is on the market after a two-year renovation by international designer Jason Bonham. The four-bedroom home on a nearly 1500sqm site has a swimming pool and drive-on access to the water.
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