It’s not often a real estate agent gets to market a home that was once an important part of their childhood.
For Ben Ryken, the chance to sell the house his grandparents bought in 1967 was the result of a polite note he popped into the new owners’ letter box.
Ryken, who works at Ray White Remuera, wrote that he would love to see inside one more time.
“I said, ‘I’m just wondering if you wouldn’t mind for me to look through and see the changes’. I mentioned I was an agent, but this was purely out of interest. When it re-sold in 2015 [after my grandparents had died] I wasn’t in real estate so I hadn’t seen the photos.”
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Late last year the owner sent Ryken a note. She said, “We’re just finishing renovations and I’d love for you guys to come through and have a look.”
“And then a couple of weekends ago she rang me and said, ‘We want to sell our house and we’d love for you to be the agent’.”
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Ryken’s grandparents, Charles and Vida Glennie, bought 14 Temple Street, Meadowbank, in 1967 when Ryken’s mum Ronice was just three years old. Sadly, 10 years later Charlie died, but Vida stayed in the house until just a few months before her death in 2013.
“When they bought, it would have been the flashiest house to buy in the new suburb,” Ryken said. His mother has kept the original sale and purchase agreement, complete with pencilled calculations by accountant Charlie, which shows her parents paid $11,240 for their new home.
“The house never changed one bit, from when we started visiting grandma after I was born in 1995.”
He remembers the modest three-bedroom house featured a pink bathroom, a cool floral wallpaper in the kitchen, and built-in shelving and a deco-style fireplace in the living room.
The kitchen after the renovation is now open-plan with an island. Photo / Supplied
The living room now has French doors opening to the pool and outdoor entertaining area. Photo / Supplied
He said his grandmother lived a quiet life, meeting up with neighbours and shopping at the Meadowbank Shopping Centre. He has vivid memories of walking up to the shops with his brother Matt (also a real estate agent, in Point Chevalier) and wheeling the supermarket trolley full of his grandma’s groceries back down the few hundred metres to the house, before one of the brothers shot back to the supermarket with the empty trolley.
“We would sit in the cafe and all the staff knew her and they knew all about us. She would give us a $5 note each and we could go to the stationery shop to buy comics or a bouncy ball.”
As a teenager, Ryken got to know the gardens well as he’d turn up with his mum to mow grandma’s lawns every week.
The decor that grandma Vida selected when she and her husband Charlie bought the house in 1966 was still there when it sold after her death in 2013. Photo / Supplied
The original kitchen. Photo / Supplied
After the house sold for $724,000 in 2013, the new owner gave it a complete makeover, opening up walls, updating the kitchen and bathrooms, and adding a fourth bedroom. They also closed in the lower-level carport to make another room, creating a deck. The current owners bought it in 2015 for $1.443 million, OneRoof records show.
Ryken said he was blown away by the changes to the house. The lawns he mowed are now the swimming pool, the former back door is now the front door (the front entrance became the ensuite bathroom), the bathrooms are glamorous and the kitchen is now part of a big open-plan space with an island.
“Mum lives in Helensville, and she’s looking forward to coming down to the open homes. I think it will be more of a shock for her than it was for me because she grew up there, she used to walk across the cemetery to get to Selwyn College.”
- 14 Temple Street, Meadowbank, Auckland, goes to auction December 11
