- Wellington’s narrow building at 9A Tory Street is for sale, featuring two apartments and a shop.
- Owners Mary McIntyre and David Copeland renovated it, maintaining its “industrial Zen” style.
- The apartments rent for $230 to $270 a night and are popular with foreign guests.
One of Wellington city’s skinniest city buildings is up for grabs in the capital’s edgy arts precinct.
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The three-storey property at 9A Tory Street, is a slice of New Zealand’s industrial past now carved into two apartments with a ground-floor shop.
The narrow building, barely four metres wide, was built around 1908 and later added to in the 1920s as a showroom for Shacklock stoves. The classic brand that had appeared on Kiwi coal ranges since the 1870s was later absorbed into Fisher & Paykel.
The 1910 Art Nouveau-style building was renovated in 2016 and turned into two apartments with a shop on the ground floor. Photo / Supplied
Owners Mary McIntyre and David Copeland told OneRoof they had long admired the building, with its Art Nouveau-style curves and two Juliet balconies.
They snapped it up in 2015 for just over $1 million, telling OneRoof: “It was a complete and utter dump, but we thought ‘OK, here is a project that has everything we want’.”
The couple quickly got stuck into renovating the property, splitting the residential floors into two separate one-bedroom apartments. They reserved the top floor for themselves and put the middle floor on Airbnb.
The style was “industrial Zen”, a nod to the building’s Shacklock past, with the couple keeping the original timber floors, freight lift, and exposed beams.
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“It was quite risky. We employed Keegan Sommers, who had just come out of architectural school but had been a builder and a joiner. It was his first big project.”
The job was bigger and more expensive than the couple had initially planned. “All the regulations had changed. It became a massive project, and we just literally threw so much money into it. We had all kinds of hiccups along the way,” McIntyre said.
The biggest hiccup was the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake. McIntyre was at home when the Reading Cinema car park immediately over the road was severely damaged. She answered the door to emergency services and had to evacuate the building on the spot, taking her dog and his bed and nothing else. She and Copeland were not allowed to return home for five months.
Both one-bedroom apartments are rented on Airbnb for between $230 and $270 a night. Photo / Supplied
The building itself was not damaged, and the couple was able to finish the renovation a year later. They also decided to rent out both apartments to a US-based film company and relocate to a place they owned in Taupō.
“Because we had a place up at the lake, we said, ‘OK, we’ll just live there’. Because we both work independently, we could do that,” McIntyre said.
The apartments, which rent for between $230 and $270 a night, have proven popular with foreign guests. “It’s literally a stone’s throw from Te Papa, and it’s very walkable,” McIntyre said. The top-floor apartment has access to a roof terrace, and there is a glimpse of the harbour down the street.
McIntyre’s favourite feature, however, is the curved walls. “[Keegan] has just been so clever. He somehow conjured space out of places you don’t expect. Everything has very clean lines, and it’s all wood. He’s mad on wood. It’s actually remarkable. It is almost like a magic box in terms of what he has created.”
The couple said the building would suit anyone from architects to creatives wanting to co-invest in central city living.
CBRE agent Dharmendra Mistry, who is marketing the property, said he expected the commercial unit on the ground floor to be leased in the near-future.
“It used to be quite a busy florist and then they moved next door into a bigger space,” said Mistry. “It suits retail, but we’ve also got a tenant who wants to use it as office space.”
- 9A Tory Street, Te Aro, Wellington, is for sale, deadline closing June 26
