A fire-damaged manor that was once considered Ranfurly's grandest home has been snapped up by out-of-town buyers.
Colliers listing agent Helen Flintoff said the new owners planned to restore the former doctor's residence over time.
The agent declined to disclose the sale price, but the historic property had been looking for offers over $280,000.
Owner Joanna Brooks put the five-bedroom house on Tyrone Street on the market in July, calling on "tradies" to pick up the restoration project.
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The manor, which sits on 4021sqm of land, was sold "as is where is" following a devastating blaze in 2022.
Brooks, who bought the property in 2019 for $431,500, had been slowly making it her own when an electrical fault in a diesel burner control panel ended her house dreams.
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The Ranfurly teacher described the horrible moment to OneRoof last month. On the morning of the fire, it was eight degrees outside and Brooks was lying in bed listening to the radio. After smelling something funny, she “rushed down the stairs to be met with an inferno behind the French doors in the lounge”.
It took firefighters almost two hours to extinguish the fire and by then a chunk of the home was gone.
Brooks told OneRoof she 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’.
The downstairs lounge area was hit worst by the blaze. Photo / Supplied
Smoke damage can be seen in the listing photos. Photo / Supplied
“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.”
The manor was designed in the late 1920s by notable Dunedin architect Henry McDowell Smith and had been used as a doctor's residence and surgery for decades.
Before moving in Brooks had 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.
Brooks said she had desperately wanted to restore the home following the fire, but couldn’t make it work. She told OneRoof after the sale that she "adored" the house and was pleased someone else with imagination, passion and tenacity had bought it with plans to restore it.
"I'm very pleased for it to someone else's," she said.
"The house deserves a whole new order."
Flintoff told OneRoof that she received six formal offers on the property. She said it would have been considered one of Ranfurly's grandest homes before the fire.
"It was such a beautiful manor with such a deep story of how it has been involved in the community. So many people had been in there."
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