- David Matulovich and Grant McCauley are selling their renovated 19th-century mansion in Nelson.
- The couple transformed the seven-bedroom villa packed with antiques, making it a highlight of the 2023 NZ House & Garden tour.
- They are downsizing locally for more freedom, citing the home’s size and Airbnb management as reasons.
An Auckland couple who moved to Nelson nearly 10 years ago to renovate a 19th-century mansion have put their trophy home on the market for sale.
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David Matulovich and Grant McCauley swapped wealthy Herne Bay for the top of the South Island in 2016 after picking up the seven-bedroom villa at 102 Nile Street for just over $1.3 million.
The pair had friends in Nelson and wanted to give life in Nelson a go. “Every time we visited, we thought, ‘We don’t want to go back to Auckland. This is where we want to stay’,” Matulovich told OneRoof.
They knew exactly what kind of house they needed: one with a three-metre stud height to accommodate the collection of mirrors and chandeliers they’d had kept in storage for more than 15 years.
The striking property boasts an exquisite collection of antiques. Photo / Supplied
The owners, David Matulovich and Grant McCauley, have spent the last eight years upgrading and fine-tuning the home. Photo / Supplied
“We couldn’t find a house we liked,” Matulovich said, “so we wrote 20 handwritten notes and popped them in the letter boxes of historic villas around central Nelson.”
The owner of 102 Nile Street rang the couple to tell them he planned to sell in three months. He had started renovating the villa, replacing rotten weather boards and installing a new kitchen, and had outlined to Matulovich and McCauley various other jobs he had planned before heading to market.
“We said, ‘No, please down tools. Stop everything. We will take it as is’. What he had been doing was not to our taste, so any more work would just be money wasted,” he said.
Matulovich said the owner was so nice he handed over the keys the day before settlement. “That wouldn’t happen in Auckland. You don’t just give somebody the keys without settling. He just said, ‘It’s yours now’.”
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Matulovich and McCauley have been busy turning the home into a masterpiece. It is bursting at the seams with antiques – the couple run an antiques business – and it was one of the highlights of the 2023 NZ House & Garden tour of Nelson.
“A neighbour came in and said, ‘Oh, you think you’re Louis XIV or something’,” McCauley said. “It’s absolutely not that. That is not the look we went for. It’s not a house [you’d see] in France or Italy. You can have touches, you can have feeling. It’s still a villa and it’s still part of the New Zealand landscape.”
He added: “We’ve been involved in antiques for 30 years. So that is really the jumping-off point for any interior that we do. It’s always going to involve antiques, and especially European 17th and 18th century antiques.”
The house has been a hit on Airbnb, but the owners are looking to step away from the business of managing the bookings. Photo / Supplied
The house was one of the highlights of the 2023 NZ House & Garden tour of Nelson. Photo / Supplied
The couple were careful when decorating to ensure that should they ever choose to sell, a new buyer wasn’t stuck with their taste.
“We love rooms where there’s tapestry all the way around,” McCauley told OneRoof. “And we like rooms that have damask all the way around the room, but we wouldn’t do that here.
“We’ve used some scenic wallpapers, some English or Italian style wallpapers, but they are only wallpaper. New Zealanders tend to be a bit scared of big patterns [and] pretty safe in their interior design.
“One bathroom has a Ralph Lauren stripe. There’s a powder room downstairs that has a reproduction of antique wallpaper. It’s got all the tears and the curls of the paper. It’s really cute. It may not be to everyone’s liking, but it’s not a big deal for somebody to put another wallpaper over the top. There’s not anything that a coat of paint for a different wallpaper wouldn’t completely change.”
The couple planned for 102 Nile Street to be a forever home, but have listed with Daniel Reed and Dennis Christian at Bayleys in order to downsize locally. “It’s just been a great eight-and-a-half years in this house in Nelson,” said Matulovich. “We love Nelson. We wish we moved sooner.”
However, the home was too big, and the Airbnb added to make the numbers work was just too much work, said Matulovich. “The Airbnb apartment has done really well. Because we’re semi-retired, we want to have more freedom.
“[It] controls the rest of your life because you have to wait for the people. We don’t leave keys out and, we can’t go and do something because we’ve got to quickly do a changeover with somebody coming in the same day.”
Before moving to Nelson, McCauley ran a furniture, interiors and antiques business and Matulovich worked as an interior designer and home-staging contractor.
The pair joined forces in Nelson and ramped up the antiques business. “When we got down here, we decided we were going to go to France and fill a container with furniture. So we did that. And then we decided to do it again, then decided we’ll just open a shop.”
The couple took the best pieces from each container for their home, and sold the rest to make the exercise worthwhile.
The couple have been fascinated with the history of the home. One of their Airbnb guests turned out to know more than they did. “When she turned up, she had a photo of the home, and she said, ‘This is my great aunt swinging as a little girl, swinging on the front gate with her mother and her brother’,” said Matulovich.
One unexpected outcome of the renovation was that the couple inadvertently created what visitors see as a Harry Potter cupboard under the stairs.
The previous owners left the couple with panels that had been removed from another staircase. “We installed the panelling here, [which created] a hidden door,” said Matulovich. “When the agents come through, they all say, ‘Oh, it’s a Harry Potter cupboard’.”
The home has an RV of $2.6m but in Auckland such a home would be worth five times as much.
Bayleys Ponsonby agent Cristina Casares said her office sold an equivalent home on Salisbury Street, in Herne Bay, for $12.6m. “The section at Salisbury is bigger, but the house is a very similar size. You would be safe to say that 102 Nile Street in Herne Bay would be worth more than $10m.”
- 102 Nile Street, in Nelson, is for sale by negotiation
