- Arts champion Peter Macky is selling his Herne Bay home after 45 years to downsize to an apartment.
- He made headlines for his award-winning restoration of a historic German train station.
- His three-bedroom Auckland home features an extensive collection of paintings.
Kiwi entrepreneur and arts champion Peter Macky is selling his Herne Bay home of 45 years.
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Macky, who hit the headlines a couple of years ago when he won a prestigious award his restoration of a German train station, told OneRoof: “It’s been a very successful home, it’s been fantastic, but now I just prefer to downsize.”
He said he had bought an apartment in Auckland's Wynyard Quarter, which is still close to everything he loves about the city.
Macky is a modern "renaissance" man. He made a name for himself as a lawyer, but is equally renowned for his full-throated support of Auckland's arts and sporting scene. He's chaired the Warriors, been a patron of Auckland Writers’ Festival, and thrown himself into the preservation of historic buildings - both in New Zealand and abroad.
The house is stylishly presented and is filled Macky's large art collection. Photo / Supplied
“I split my time between Berlin and Auckland. I love both cities passionately," he said.
His three-bedroom house has been home to one of the country's finest private art collections, which includes two works by Otis Frizzell and pieces by other well-known painters.
In fact, the listing for the house highlights its advantages in this regard: "The home's grand, generous proportions and quality interiors are a statement in refined elegance, featuring an impressive living/dining room with a soaring 3.5-metre ceiling. Abundant wall space provides a gallery-like setting for your art collection."
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Macky, however, is modest about his collection. “We’re not big art collectors. We don’t have a warehouse like Dame Jenny Gibbs, who is a friend of mine. No [Colin] McCahons or Gretchen Albrecht,” he told OneRoof.
Macky's house is unusual in that it is a duplex. He teamed up with a friend in 1980 to buy what was probably the last piece of vacant land in Herne Bay. They split the section in two and commissioned the build of duplexes – one for each of them.
“We did it together. We found the piece of land, which was a large piece of land, and we built at the rear of it. The house was designed by my brother-in-law, who’s a Queensland architect,” he said.
Peter Macky: “I split my time between Berlin and Auckland. I love both cities passionately." Photo / Babiche Martens
The German station Macky spent nearly 10 years restoring. Photo / Supplied
The Hamilton Road home sits on 559sqm of land and has a CV of $3.475m.
Macky said he was driven to save old buildings after the destruction of Coolangatta, a Remuera home built by his maternal great-grandmother, which was ripped down in a matter of hours in 2006. Macky vented his anger at that destruction in the book Coolangatta: A Homage, which he co-wrote with Paul Waite in 2010.
He made headlines in New Zealand and in Germany when he took on the restoration of the Kaiserbahnhof (royal train station) in the village of Halbe, south-east of Berlin.
Macky had been living in Berlin for about six months when on a regular cycling outing he came across the decaying train station, which had been built in 1865 for Kaiser Wilhelm I’s hunting trips. The Kaiser and his son Wilhelm II stopped there for refreshments when on their private train.
After the last Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate in 1918, the line was used less. It became more important during Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion of Russia, said Macky.
When Germany was divided between east and west in 1945, the Kaiserbahnhof was in the east, where the communist rulers weren’t that keen on private railways for royalty and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the building was left to decay.
Macky snapped up the building and started a 10-year restoration project, which he described as challenging and expensive. “I can’t afford to [restore] every building, [but] this was a hugely important building. It was a challenge, and that’s why I did it.”
- 1/21 Hamilton Road, Herne Bay, Auckland, is for sale, deadline closing March 27
