Board and batten ceilings, timber floors, original fireplaces and a three metre stud would be on many a home purchaser’s wishlist, to say nothing of a view of the sea. Add multiple living spaces, covered decks, native trees, a vintage facade and an enviable location on Auckland’s North Shore, and you are describing 32 Hinemoa Street in Birkenhead.
A new owner with vision and an eye for potential is sought to take custody of this once-beautiful and much loved icon of North Shore history.
Known as The Gables and with a long history as a care facility, the house is a rare example of a villa in one-and-a half storey format. Villas were usually single storey buildings and two storeyed examples where both levels have full room height are much less common.
So says the Auckland Council’s Schedule of Buildings, Objects and Places of Heritage Significance, in which the entire exterior of the original part of the house is listed.
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A complex plan with bay windows and extensive verandahs has led to an interesting form which, the schedule says, may be unique regionally or beyond. “The end walls of the gables and gabled dormer windows, from which the name of the house is clearly derived, contribute to its unusually picturesque quality.”
Built some time before the 1880s as a home for the Campbell family, the two-storeyed villa became part of the then Auckland Hospital Board in the 1920s. Over the years it has been used as a maternity home, a children's facility for the Princess Mary Hospital, and later as a nursing hospital for North Shore. It was closed for a number of years until the current owners, David and Mary Perry, bought it in 1981.
With nursing and health management backgrounds, they re-established the house as a hospital, bringing it up to strict health and fire codes, adding air conditioning, sluice and treatment rooms. Mary ran the facility from the start.
On a generous 1006sqm site, it boasts several bedrooms, multiple living areas and bathrooms on the ground floor, all of which retain many heritage features. Upstairs are four more bedrooms, a kitchenette, living areas, a bathroom and separate toilet.
David and Mary added extensive decking and a gazebo so that patients could be wheeled outside to enjoy the garden air.
“At its peak, we were an 18-bed hospital, with 26 staff working around the clock,” says David. “Local nurses loved working here; it was a real family atmosphere.”
The Perry family lived on the top floor and Mary recalls that time with great pleasure.
“It was lovely to live there,” she says. “I love villa-style houses – the old fashioned cutting and carving of the wood makes you feel secure in them.”
In the 1990s they subdivided the western half of the land so they could shift another gracious old villa on for their family home. Mary gradually terraced the site into extensive cottage gardens.
Now, living virtually next door, she is saddened that the house will be sold, but heartened by the restrictions in place that will ensure the outside of the original building is retained.
“I am happy to know it will grace the area for a very long time.”
32 Hinemoa Street in Birkenhead is being sold by tender.
