Plan to bowl bungalow riles neighbours
A 1920s California bungalow is at the centre of a row in the leafy suburb of Epsom involving wealthy neighbours, heritage groups, a powerful lawyer and AJ the cat.
Clair Connor owns a Crescent Rd bungalow near Cornwall Park valued at nearly $4 million and wants to demolish it to build a new home for herself and her ageing parents.
Up against her are many of her neighbours, two of whom have hired a specialist resource management litigator Bronwyn Carruthers KC; Heritage NZ, the Character Coalition, made up of 60 heritage and community groups; and the heritage team at Auckland Council.
Connor is seeking resource consent to demolish the single-storey home with a 1990s extension and replace it with a two-storey “carefully designed” home with bungalowperiod features, a swimming pool, pool pavilion, and a three-car garage with a loft bedroom for her parents.
Her planning application said remediating and renovating the house is cost prohibitive and replacing it was the only feasible option.
She declined to speak to the Weekend Herald about the matter, instead issuing a statement through a lawyer.
This is the second attempt by Connor to test the rules aimed at protecting pre-1940 homes in Special Character Areas across the city.
Her first attempt in 2021 failed after residents learned of the nonnotified plans and filed a judicial review, which led Connor to withdraw the application.
In February this year, Connor put in a fresh application to demolish the house, which this time has been publicly notified and opposed by Auckland Council’s heritage team on the grounds it will “significantly harm the special character values of the area”.
The heritage team said the house
was an “excellent representative of the bungalow style”, whereas the proposed house is “a haphazard composition of bungalow-style features”.
What’s more, heritage staff said the application was “completely contrary” to the rules for demolishing buildings in Special Character Areas. The rules state building must be beyond repair.
Connor’s statement from lawyer Peter Spring said her application had gone through a detailed assessment by leading planning consultants and heritage architects, plus a thorough assessment by Auckland Council before it was publicly notified.
“The conclusion reached by the applicant’s planning and heritage experts, and by the council’s consenting team, is that the proposed dwelling is appropriate in this location, and generally maintains and responds positively to the existing character values of the streetscapes and Special Character Area.”
This assessment is not shared by several neighbours, including Tile Warehouse managing director Neville Colbert and his wife Claire, who live next door to O’Connor.
“I used to feed her cat AJ, just doing the neighbourly thing,” Neville Colbert said.
Another close neighbour, Susie Wolf, said she and her husband were made by the council to go through hoops to make changes to their home and were disappointed Connor had previously received consent to demolish and rebuild.
“The house doesn’t need to be demolished. When we moved in here 20 years ago that was the prettiest house in the street . . . and the gardens were beautiful.”
The Character Coalition’s John Burns said demolishing the property would devalue the special character of the area.
Heritage NZ is also planning to oppose the application.