‘Emotional’ battle for $5m Vogel House
Vogel family descendants want an uncontested opportunity to reclaim their grandparents’ Lower Hutt home, the former prime minister’s residence, Vogel House.
Jocelyn Vogel and husband James gifted the house to the Crown in 1965, according to Heritage New Zealand, due to fears it would be subdivided after they died, but their grandsons fear that is exactly what would be likely to happen unless it was returned to them.
The home is now considered surplus for the Crown, so Tim and Geoff Vogel are claiming ‘‘emotional hardship’’, and want it returned without having to compete for it.
The Crown decided to get rid of it in 2013, ‘‘on the basis of it being under-utilised [and] considered expensive to maintain’’, according to the Department of Internal Affairs.
The latest valuation, from 2014, says the land in central Lower Hutt, is worth $5 million.
The property was offered to the Vogel Charitable Trust and the Wellington SPCA – both beneficiaries of Jocelyn Vogel’s estate – in January 2016 for $415,000, which was said to be the value of the improvements.
Tim and Geoff Vogel appealed against the decision in a bid to regain the home in which they were raised, on the grounds of ‘‘emotional hardship’’.
At the High Court in Wellington yesterday the lawyer for the Commissioner of Crown Lands, Rachel Roff, said it was accepted and acknowledged that the Vogels had an emotional attachment to the land, but not to the point where it met the threshhold of hardship under the relevant law.
Neither was it a hardship if the Vogels could not, or would struggle to, afford the land if it was put up for sale.
The Commissioner of Crown Lands ruled against it being returned to the family ‘‘without competition’’.
The brothers asked a judge to review the commissioner’s decision, and order it to be reconsidered.
Justice Cameron Mander reserved his decision.
The brothers’ lawyer, Richard Fowler, QC, said some umbrage was taken to the suggestion that there was anything contrived about the emotional hardship claimed.
It was not faux or fake, he said. He quoted a statement by Tim Vogel about the family’s association with the area of the Hutt Valley that went back 160 years, that his family built the house and no other private family had lived at the property.
The Vogel brothers’ father died prematurely and they were raised within the family at the house.
Tim Vogel said that after the gifting, his grandmother often remarked that she wished it would be returned to the family because it was not being used as the prime minister’s residence.
Fowler said the commissioner could set a price that could include a nominal value, or one that reflected the cost of improvements.
Roff said the commissioner had some flexibility about price but that did not extend to giving it back, or selling it for a nominal price.
It had to be sold for a reasonable price but that did not necessarily mean market value, although there was an expectation that the Crown would recoup a reasonable return.