A tiny two-bedroom beachfront cottage in one of Wellington’s priciest suburbs is on the market for sale with plans for a Grand Designs-style home that would see buyers living life on the edge.
Bayleys agents Matt Hourigan and Ann Curtis, who are marketing the 80sqm house at 197 Marine Parade, in Seatoun, said the property sits at the bottom of a 592sqm site that stretches up a vertiginous bush-clad slope to the road above.
The vendors, who picked up the property in 2016 for $595,000, obtained resource consents to subdivide off the upper section at 156 Seatoun Heights Road, and they had explored building a house that perched over the cliff. They had even commissioned concepts from architect Nic Ballara, who wowed viewers of the first series of Grand Designs NZ with his cliff-hanger house in Wellington’s Northland.
Hourigan said that the concepts, if realised, would be impressive. “It would be tricky to price the property as it is, but you’d have to have money to get into it. There are beautiful stunning architect-designed houses on Seatoun Heights Road. It can be done,” he said.
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Ballara’s house was anchored to the slope with giant steel cables, so it appeared to cantilever, but Hourigan said buyers would need geo-tech reports and quantity surveys to get close to an idea of how much a build like that would cost.
The 592sqm site stretches from Seatoun Heights Road above to Marine Parade below. Photo / Supplied
The 80sqm cottage at 97 Marine Parade has a smart new kitchen. Photo / Supplied
Hourigan said he’d had a wide variety of interest from investors and developers exploring spec builds to returning Kiwis “with deep pockets to create their dream”.
197 Marine Parade has an RV of $1.54 million but properties in Seatoun can fetch more than double that, with the average property value for the suburb being just over $2m.
Architect Nic Ballara's cliff-hanger home wowed viewers of the first series of Grand Designs NZ. Photo / TV3
A four-bedroom Seatoun home renovated by Ballara recently sold for $2.7m. Photo / Supplied
The suburb has seen a handful of $2m-plus sales this year: a modern four-bedroom house on Inglis Street, a couple of houses away from the beach, sold in March for $2.7m – $400,000 above its RV. It was renovated by the same architect, Nic Ballara.
In April, a striking four-bedroom home across the road from the beach on Hector Street fetched $2.21m while another on Dundas Street went for $2.02m – more than $700,000 what it last sold for five years ago.
197 Marine Parade, in Seatoun, Wellington, goes to tender on August 10.
