Ponsonby’s 30-year makeover: ‘You were either an art dealer, a drug dealer or a prostitute’

In the days before Auckland’s trendiest suburbs became trendy there was a bohemian vibe, according to real estate agent Jason Trowbridge, who says the now upmarket multi-million-dollar neighbourhoods of Ponsonby and Grey Lynn have gone from grunge to New York over the 30 years he has sold there.

Trowbridge, a former pastry chef, has seen over the years countless transformations of run-down villas into immaculate, architecturally stunning homes, with price tags climbing from the tens of thousands of dollars to the millions.

“You were either an art dealer, a drug dealer or a prostitute living in the bohemian streets of Ponsonby and surrounds,” says Trowbridge of what the market was like when he first began selling real estate in the neighbourhoods 30 years ago.

“It was wonderful; it was bohemian at its best. Berlin had nothing on Ponsonby, seriously.”

The agent for LJ Hooker misses the mix of ethnicities and vibrancy of old but says suburbs change and Ponsonby, which now has a fair amount of wealth, has a different but still great vibe with its cafes and restaurants, and its lovingly restored houses, some of which date back to the 1800s.

The people who buy today tend to like their villas already done, he says, and some of those homes have come a long, long way.

The first do-up he sold was in 1997, a deceased estate on Brown Street owned by a hoarder.

He had returned from Sydney where he worked as a pastry chef, saying he had a sandwich shop on Ponsonby Road for a while before he met developer Andy Davies, who owned Ponsonby Real Estate at the time, and switched careers.

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He recalls walking into the Brown Street two-storey original miner’s cottage, which was packed to the gunnels, with a sense of awe at how someone had created and ordered their life. “There were only little alleys I could get through,” he says.

The ad for the listing pulled no punches. Headlined Uncle Harold wasn’t a Handyman, ARE YOU?, it went on to say, “it’s a dump and not for the faint-hearted”.

Trowbridge says among the myriad possessions there were a number of antiques and he was entrusted to hold garage sales which he did at the same time as the open homes.

“I had people not only looking at the house but selling things and in those days I couriered off envelopes of cash to the person in question.”

LJ Hooker agent Jason Trowbridge: ”It was bohemian at its best. Berlin had nothing on Ponsonby.” Photo / Supplied

A newspaper clipping of the run-down cottage on Brown Street that Trowbridge sold in the 1990s. Photo / Supplied

The now renovated cottage sold for $1.68m earlier this year. Photo / Supplied

While he doesn’t have photos of Brown Street from that time, he says the house was well-preserved and in a brilliant location, and it sold to a prominent business person for $240,000. That person undertook a renovation and Trowbridge sold the house again two years later for $320,000.

OneRoof records show it sold again in 2005 for $535,000, in 2015 for $1.18 million, in 2021 for $1.89m, and again in May this year for $1.68m.

Many do-up villas have been in the same family for decades, and Trowbridge walks owners through what can be a lengthy process, sometimes staying alongside them as the matter goes through probate.

While he sells any era of home, Trowbridge says when it comes to do-ups each house has its own sense of adventure.

Sometimes they come with camphor chests which let loose “a flux of moths” when opened and sometimes there are white net curtains “held together by cobwebs”.

Another of his early sales was in 1999 when he listed a deceased estate on Stanmore Road, in Grey Lynn.

Ponsonby’s main shopping strip is now a mixture of high-end clothes stores and swish restaurants and cafes. Photo / Fiona Goodall

A Ponsonby Real Estate write-up from the time said there were plenty of signs the home had once been a gracious villa because it looked like the owners had popped out for tea in 1914 but never returned. “It is all, eerily, as they would have left it,” he wrote.

“The mouldings, the fireplace, the floorboards – it’s all here, albeit under a few layers of dust.”

The house came with vintage coca cola bottles, turn of the century roller blinds and a floor lined with a 1955 copy of the Auckland Star, along with a claw foot enamel bath and a woodfire cooking stove.

OneRoof records show the house first sold in 1985 for $85,000, then Trowbridge sold it in 1999 for $255,000 to a prominent developer.

A consent was issued soon after the sale, another in 2019, and the house now has an RV of $3.2m.

In 2014, Trowbridge got the listing for a notorious Grey Lynn property on Grosvenor Street which he says belonged to someone high in the police force but which was tenanted to artists and musicians.

The rooms were a riot of keyboards and clutter, and he says he didn’t bother tidying up because buyers could see past the mess as the house was in a prime location with city views.

A notorious party house on Grosvenor Street, in Grey Lynn, which Trowbridge sold in 2014. Photo / Supplied

The Grosvenor Street villa was upgraded and turned into a highly desirable family home and last sold for close to $4m. Photo / Supplied

The house sold for $1.2m and records show a consent was issued that year. A New Zealand Herald article told of the home’s subsequent transformation from “dump to desirable”, saying it was once known as the party house of Grey Lynn and a regular crash pad for dozens of university students.

Trowbridge says the house has been beautifully renovated and OneRoof records show it sold last year for $3.825m.

He has watched through the years as renovations have morphed from a lick of paint and a store-bought kitchen to something special.

Ponsonby and surrounds have gone through phases of gentrification, he says, with prices rising and rising, from $200,000 to $500,000 and cracking $1m in the early 2000s, then the ante was upped even more.

“We hit $1m and everyone clutched their pearls and thought, ‘God’ and that’s when people really started to bring New York, Sydney and London back into these Ponsonby homes and we began to chip into these extreme figures of $2m-plus, $3m-plus, $4m-plus.”

There are far fewer homes left to be renovated but Trowbridge says there are still a few around, saying he’s in touch with perhaps 35 or 40 families.

Boutique developers often buy first, bringing in architects and an international flavour to the renovation. They sink a lot of money into the process with designs generally opening up the back of the house to create indoor/outdoor flow.

Buyers today demand high standards – terrazzo bathrooms, European kitchens, lovely landscaping and pools – and they want to walk into a finished product.

“They don’t want to see it, they just want to walk in and feel it. They want to sit down and that’s it, and they’ve got the money to do it.”

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