- Huntly House, moved 500km from Palmerston North to Clarks Beach, is for sale after renovation.
- The relocation involved six trucks and two cranes, with challenges including resource consents and a tornado.
- The seven-bedroom villa, renovated for $1.4m, is listed with an RV of $4.3m.
An abandoned Victorian villa that was chopped into six pieces and transported some 500km from Palmerston North to Clarks Beach has been listed for sale after a stunning transformation.
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Huntly House, at 111 Wharf Road, is one of several relocated historic homes on the market in the Auckland area. Vendor Hayley Parsons first spotted it languishing in a yard in 2017. It was love at first sight, but she had to convince both her husband, Chris, and the owner of the moving firm that the grand dame was worth it.
The two-storey villa was cut up, moved over 500km and then put back together. Photo / Supplied
The vendors spent $1.4m restoring the historic home. Photo / Supplied
“I was thinking, ‘My God, this house has housed conversations with people about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand’. It was here when the Titanic sank. People were sitting around talking about the Titanic in front of the mantelpiece that’s in my kitchen,” she told OneRoof.
Central House Movers tried to convince the couple to build a brand new home instead of moving the villa to their 8.95ha plot just south of Auckland, but Parsons was adamant.
Moving such a large home, even after it was cut up, was no mean feat. The relocation involved two cranes, six trucks, and numerous pilot vehicles. Central House Movers’ Matt Nairn said the company shifted around 300 homes a year, but jobs like Huntly House were few and far between.
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Asked if it was a challenge or a nightmare, Nairn laughed and replied: “a bit of both”. The hard part wasn’t the road trip, but loading the property safely onto the trucks. Luckily, Huntly House had already been moved once before.
“Huntly House had previously been chopped up,” Nairn told OneRoof. “We didn’t get to choose the cut lines, but the cut lines were where they pretty well needed to be anyway.”
Midway through the move, disaster struck when the Parsons received conflicting information about the resource consents they needed to bring Huntly House onto their section. “The first two pieces got to Auckland, and then we had to pause when council said, ‘Sorry, you now require a resource consent’,” Hayley said.
A drawing of the villa in its initial heyday. Photo / Supplied
“That caused a lot of stress, but we got it sorted pretty quickly. It was probably the world’s fastest resource consent approval in the history of council. It only took a couple of weeks, which is unheard of. We then brought the last four pieces up.”
The pieces were eventually reunited and stitched back together, but disaster struck once again – in the form of a tornado. “It took the roof off,” said Hayley, adding there was a big silver lining to the freak weather event. “We had the grounds for quite a substantial insurance claim to fund parts of the renovation, which made it even more doable.”
Midway through the renovation with Heineke Builders, the Parsons moved to the UK for work and were forced to manage the project remotely. “We used an app with our builders and were able to upload photos and whatnot,” Hayley said.
The house was damaged by a freak tornado. Photo / Supplied
“Then we had Zoom meetings every week, regardless of where we were in the world. So we had Zoom meetings with our builders from pubs in Ireland, Turkey, and Italy, just all across Europe, to see how things were going.
“I would fly back to New Zealand every few months and stay maybe two to four weeks, stay in the house with no running water and no power and just, you know, because it was much easier for me to make decisions on the spot.”
The entire renovation process took two years and cost $1.4m, but Hayley and Chris are now selling up following a change in family circumstances.
Once it was known the house was for sale, the pair was contacted by the charity Te Kiwi Maia. “We sponsor Te Kiwi Maia, and they use the property four times a year for their wellness workshops,” said Hayley. “They are seeing if they can raise the funds to buy [the property].”
Also up for grabs in the Franklin area is 20 Andrew Pye Road, a villa that featured on Moving Houses New Zealand. Photo / Supplied
The seven-bedroom villa, which has an RV of $4.3m, is for sale with Bayleys agents Michele Mathieson and Maddison Butcher, who describe it in their listing as one of the area’s “most admired properties”. It’s not the only relocated home on Mathieson’s books, though. She is also selling a 110-year-old house that appeared in the inaugural episode of Moving Houses New Zealand.
The villa at 20 Andrew Pye Road, in Franklin, was shifted from Remuera to its current location with the help of Clarke Gayford, the husband of former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern.
Further north, in Matakana, Barfoot & Thompson James Doole has a relocated villa that was saved from the scrapheap up for grabs.
The five-bedroom house at 13 Ridgewater Lane spent the first 100-plus years of its life at 25 Balfour Street, in Auckland’s Parnell.
The house at 13 Ridgewater Lane, in Matakana, was saved from destruction and moved from its original home in Auckland's Parnell. Photo / Supplied
The Parnell site was bought by developers to turn into a high-end apartment block. During the planning stage, the developers discovered that the villa was one of the oldest homes in the suburb.
HR Group development manager Court Ross said: “We came across some images from 1899 when the site was home to Captain William Newton, who was a mariner. He built the house to view his ships in the harbour. And his family lived there until the 1930s.
“Given all that history, it just didn’t really feel right to pull the old girl down. It was a beautiful house. It was quite a well-known property and obviously sat very proud there on the hill overlooking the tennis club of Gladstone Road.
“It was something that our CEO, Hannah Williamson, just wanted to do. She felt it would be right.”
While developers do sometimes sell old homes for removal, HR Group decided to buy the land in Matakana, relocate the home itself, and renovate it.
“We’ve refurbished it to a really high standard,” said Ross. The developer used the same designer for the Matakana job as for the Elysian complex. “So it’s a stately piece of land, all perfectly flat. It’s been well landscaped, and honestly, the house sits really well in its new environment.”
Court said it proved a bigger job than expected. “But we had a really good team of builders on board called Fortified Construction, who do a lot of villa renovations, and they’ve been really great to work with. Captain Newton would be proud.”
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