The owner of a historic South Island manor damaged by fire is looking for a builder – not to fix the home, but to buy it.
The OneRoof listing for 61 Tyrone Street, in Ranfurly, Otago, is “calling the tradies”, and Colliers agent Helen Flintoff says her phone has been running hot since the five-bedroom property hit the market last week.
The price point may be the reason. Following the devastating blaze that broke out in 2022, the property’s RV was reassessed and now sits at $350,000, down from $475,000 in 2019.
The former doctor’s residence, which sits on 4021sqm, is being sold “as is where is”. Local teacher Joanna Brooks said she was reluctantly selling.
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The house was her dream home. She bought it in October 2019 for $431,500 and had been slowly making it her own when in May 2022 an electrical fault in a diesel burner control panel sparked a fire.
On the morning of the blaze, it was eight degrees outside and Brooks was lying in bed listening to Radio New Zealand. After smelling something funny, she “rushed down the stairs to be met with an inferno behind the French doors in the lounge”.
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It took firefighters almost two hours to extinguish the fire. By then a chunk of the home was gutted.
Brooks had bought the home to reduce the commute from the farm she shared with her husband. “I married a Central Otago farmer and got a job at the secondary school here. I had been living at a school flat but then [61 Tyrone Street] came up for sale. I thought, ‘How wonderful. I’ll have that and live between the farm and Ranfurly’.
“Just after I bought it, I would sit outside and say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it. I love it so much’. I felt like I was in an English country estate.”
Before moving in Brooks rented out the house to the producers of the Oscar-winning movie Power of the Dog, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch and was shot in the surrounding countryside.
The downstairs lounge area was hit worst by the blaze. Photo / Supplied
Smoke damage can be seen in the listing photos. Photo / Supplied
Brooks said she had built up some wonderful memories at the house – although over a much shorter period than she anticipated. “We had many happy family occasions and Christmases in this rather gorgeous house, which had beautiful grounds. We had picnics under the willow tree,” she told OneRoof.
The home was designed in the late 1920s by notable Dunedin architect Henry McDowell Smith.
Thanks to the home’s many decades as a doctor’s residence and surgery, nearly everyone that Brooks meets has been inside her house as a patient, or a staff member.
Brooks said she desperately wanted to restore the home following the fire, but couldn’t make it work. “I’m ready for somebody else to take her on. I hope there is someone out there who has the imagination, passion, and cash to do it justice. It’s really very beautiful,” she said.
61 Tyrone Street is one of several large and unique properties for sale in and around Ranfurly.
Flintoff is also selling the eight-bedroom Hyde School Accommodation and Eatery, which features a charming 1869 schoolhouse, as well as a home, and guest suite with five ensuite rooms. The property at 9125 Hyde-Middlemarch Road, Ranfurly, has been on the market since June 2023 and is for sale by negotiation.
A nine-bedroom backpackers’ hostel, in the old Post Office building in the centre of Ranfurly, is also up for grabs. The property at 11 Pery Street, Ranfurly, has an RV of $455,000 and is being marked by PGG Wrightson’s Shane Turfus.
- 61 Tyrone Street, in Ranfurly, Central Otago, is for sale by negotiation
