Back to the Futuro for climber jail
It’s the ultimate combo – a retro playground equipment will move to the site of a Futuro home.
After a frenzied Trade Me Auction, which attracted 219 bids, a Christchurch man snapped up the Officer Big Mac climber jail with a winning bid of $2260 on Sunday.
‘‘I would have paid whatever I had to,’’ Nick McQuoid said.
‘‘It’s going to be like an art piece . . . people can go up and down them if they choose. I played on them as a kid back in the day, and thought they would go well with my spaceship houses.’’
McQuoid owns two Futuro fibreglass homes in Ohoka, north of Christchurch, and plans for them and his latest purchase to attract guests.
There were only 40 surviving Futuro homes, which were conceived by Matti Suuronen in Finland in 1968 to be used as ‘‘portable’’ ski chalets.
The insulated fibreglass structures were designed so the interior could heat up in just 20 minutes.
The playground equipment was also fibreglass, which would make it easy for him to clean up, he said.
The character Officer Big Mac was a ‘McDonaldland’ policeman, a popular marketing campaign in the 1970s-1990s.
McQuoid said he remembered playing on the climbing equipment at Linwood McDonald’s in Christchurch as a child, and Officer Big Mac was the one he ‘‘really wanted’’.
He planned to truck the Dunedin-based equipment, which weighs over 200 kilograms, to his property.
McQuoid said he was a ‘‘massive collector of crazy retro stuff’’.
In February 2017 a Trademe auction featuring an Officer Big Mac climber jail, a Mayor McCheese roundabout and a Hamburglar dual swing set made national headlines.
Twizel campground manager Tony Ritchie paid $11,000 to win the TradeMe auction.