Life in Greenlane for the Haldane family has been as rural as it gets in the heart of Auckland city. Fourteen years ago, Hamish Haldane and Georgina Caughey used to bring their firstborn, baby Helena, across town to Cornwall Park for the green views, the fresh air and the great sense of country.
They lived in suburban Kingsland back then but it was the leafy environs around this equally established suburb that won them over as they started looking ahead at their family’s long-term needs.
They discovered this freehold property in a wider neighbourhood where many properties are on Cornwall Park Trust Board leasehold land.
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Major renovations during the 1970s had virtually doubled the size of this house with the addition of a new bedroom/bathroom wing to create its new L-shaped configuration.
Outside — off the kitchen, family room, and bedrooms — were sheltered lawns, gardens, fruit trees, and space for children.
Hamish and Georgina saw further potential inside and out. They reconfigured the layout within the house’s original footprint a year after they moved in. In many ways they did the same to the outside, levelling the lawns and planting low hedges that created an “outdoor room” beyond their bedroom.
“It was the location and the potential,” says Hamish. “It’s rare to get this amount of flat land and the privacy is something else that we have really liked as well.”
Friends used to say that the house was like a real farmhouse. “It really does have a farmhouse quality to it,” says Georgina.
The landmark totara that Georgina describes as “the gentleman of the garden” has watched over Helena, 14, India, 12, and Sylvie, 6, growing up here and family breakfasts in the sun.
The girls have their own Christmas and birthday mementos, including their playhouse and the wooden jungle gym and its platform where they’d eat their lunch.
The fruits of this garden have yielded Georgina’s grapefruit marmalade and feijoa crumble from her new kitchen, where she could keep an eye on the children outside.
Renovating that kitchen brought it out of its 1970s timber-lined box and into the integrated family room with its original wood-burning fireplace, identical to the one in the adjacent formal lounge.
The five-month renovation was mapped out by architect Graham Upton and they worked collectively to achieve a sympathetic update to the original home.
Floors once glued down with lino were painstakingly stripped back, tinted and restored beneath the original beam and panel bungalow ceilings.
At the front of the house, two rooms have become guest bedrooms, Hamish’s art studio and a study. In the family’s bedroom wing, Hamish and Georgina turned four-bedrooms and a bathroom into three double bedrooms and a large family bathroom that complements the powder room off the laundry.
A large master en suite off the couple’s bedroom now includes a dressing room.
Right around this house, it is the characterful windows that add some clue to the house as it was.
In the master bedroom, the architect specified a new timber picture window with small upper panes that matches the one in the family room and the front lounge.
The Haldane family have been based overseas with Hamish’s global digital marketing job and they have decided this home needs the guardianship of yet another young family.
1 RENOWN AVE, GREENLANE, AUCKLAND
4 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 2 carparks
SIZE (more or less): Land 1157sq m, house 206 sq m.
AUCTION: Aug 8.
INSPECT: Sat/Sun 12-12.30pm.
SCHOOLS: Cornwall Park School, Remuera Intermediate School, EGGS, AGS.
CONTACT: Jo Johnstone, Unlimited Potential, 021 411107, Ronald Lim, 0274 827166.
