- John Seddon, a plasterer with over 50 years of experience, is retiring and selling his business.
- Seddon’s work includes restoring ceilings at Larnach Castle and Earnscleugh Castle.
- The business, valued at $250,000, includes over 600 moulds and offers potential for growth.
John Seddon knows New Zealand’s prestige homes like the back of his hand. He’s not a professional historian; he’s a plasterer.
Start your property search
And after more than 50 years of restoring historic ceilings, he’s calling it quits and selling his business.
Seddon joined the family business, Seddon’s Fibrous Plasterers, in 1973, a job that got him and his team inside more than a few Kiwi castles.
He’s often sworn to secrecy about the work he does for whom, but among the high-profile homes he can talk about are Larnach Castle, in Dunedin, and the Grand Designs NZ spectacle Earnscleugh Castle, whose owners famously blew the budget and spent $11 million on the renovation.
Seddon’s ceiling work at Earnscleugh required the removal of the ceiling moulds while the castle was being strengthened. Photo / Supplied
Larnach Castle in Dunedin has provided ongoing work to the company for years. Photo / Supplied
Seddon and his team restored a lot of the old ceilings at Earnscleugh. “They had to come down so the building could be strengthened,” Seddon told OneRoof. “We made moulds of the sections and recreated them.”
A New Zealand Herald report on the renovation pegged the ceiling cost at $180,000.
At Larnach Castle, the job has been years-long, with Seddon replacing sections of the ceiling as the owners battled to stop water ingress.
“Larnach Castle was built in the late 1800s, and it leaked a lot because of the way they were built in those days, and it was up on the hill, up above the Otago Peninsula, so it copped all the weather,” Seddon told OneRoof.
Discover more:
- Grand Designs NZ castle for sale again - but price expectations double
- Muscular townhouse obliterates Dunedin record - architect not surprised
- Black Caps star Jacob Duffy selling his high-tech home after welcoming baby
“It has very ornate ceilings and we went up there and took sections down, brought them to the factory, made new rubber moulds and once the repairs had been done and the structural strengthening's done, we [went back] and put it all back together again,” he said.
“We won an Institute of Architects Award for one of the ceilings we had done there. You can’t even tell we’ve been there. And it was pretty rough when we started.”
Seddon has also repaired many of Dunedin’s public buildings, including the Railway Station, Dunedin’s Regent Theatre, Town Hall, and in the last couple of years he’s done work for some high-end homes in Central Otago and Queenstown-Lakes.
The company can take drawings and turn them into intricate plasterwork. Photo / Supplied
“We did a big house in the hills behind Arrowtown, maybe 12 months ago. A lot of the walls of the spiral staircase, and a lot of circular lightwells,” he said.
“We get involved in a lot of curved work, these days, one-off moulds, curved stuff, anything that’s a wee bit out of the ordinary.”
The Christchurch earthquakes also provided considerable work for the country’s few remaining high-end fibrous plaster makers and installers, with Seddon picking up an award for some feature ceilings in the ANZ Centre in High Street, Christchurch,
“That was quite a coup for us, coming from Mosgiel.”
One of Seddon’s most memorable jobs is the one he did for Dot Smith, aka the Queen of Ōamaru.
Smith turned her childhood dream into a reality when she and her husband, Neil, built Riverstone Castle on the family’s dairy farm. “She [commissioned] some amazing detailed plasterwork, he said. “Dot came with a whole pile of cuttings out of magazines and said, ’Can you do this and that and this and that?'.”
The answer was a resounding yes. “Dad always used to say, ‘If you can draw it, we can make it’,” Seddon said. “You’re only limited by the designer’s imagination really.”
Now aged 75, Seddon has decided it’s time to retire. The business, which operates out of rented premises at Kinmont Park, in Dunedin, is for sale for $250,000 and includes more than 600 moulds and other stock.
Seddon’s had a mixture of large commercial contracts and private work with residential jobs ranging in cost from $1000 to $20,000.
Ricky Cockerill, of ABC Business Sales Dunedin, said the company had few competitors and presented a good opportunity for a new owner to take it to the next level.
Cockerill said he had sold 500 businesses in the last financial year, and businesses that have been in families for many years often got a new lease of life with new owners.
“With these businesses, sometimes when you put them in fresh hands, which is what we do all day, every day, you see this new energy, new artistic flair and creativity come in and the businesses just boom.”
- Click here to find properties for sale in Dunedin
