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From Heritage New Zealand, Spring 2005

Flat Out Fabulous

by Penelope Carroll

Braemar is a B & B with a pedigree. Jean Batten used to make flying visits.

Braemar's interiors are warm and inviting. Photo: Mark Smith

He is the corporate voice of TV3 and Classic Hits. She is the manager of their bed and breakfast business. Together, John and Sue Sweetman have spent most of the hours they were not
working or sleeping - and “a considerable amount of money”- over the past 10 years lovingly restoring and refurbishing Braemar in central Auckland’s Parliament Street, site of the country’s first parliament.

Braemar, once “a big rundown old house in dreadful condition”, is now an elegant B&B. You may have seen glimpses of it on screen or in magazines: the opening scene of Goodbye Pork Pie was shot here, and it appeared in The Maori Merchant of Venice. The house is also much in demand for fashion shoots and commercials. Recently, it had a role in Not Only but Always, a BBC production about the life of
Peter Cook.

The three-storeyed, 464-square-metre, plastered double brick
and kauri house, built as a family home by John Russell Gray,
a dental importer, in 1901, is registered as a Category II historic place. It replaced a large wooden house on the site, belonging to a Dr Kenderdine, that had burnt to the ground.
Braemar was bought in 1917 by Potter and Stanton, the property developers who built the nearby Courtville complex. In the early 1970s, it was taken over by the Government, who planned to knock it and the Middle Courtville and Corner Courtville apartment blocks down to make way for planned extensions to the nearby High Court.

The main entrance. Photo: Mark Smith

The Save the Courtvilles campaign raged for many years.
Residents of the apartment buildings - including the Sweetmans, who were living in Corner Courtville at the time - and their supporters finally won out. They formed a company and bought the three buildings back from the Government in 1989.

“We got together the deposit with the plan of putting the
apartments into separate titles and selling them to people who
lived there,” says Sue. “With multiple ownership, we thought the buildings were less likely to get knocked down.”

She and John bought two of the apartments. Then, in 1994,
Braemar was put up for auction to finance the upgrading of
Corner Courtville.The Sweetmans bid and bought it.
“It took a while before we could start renovating,” says Sue,
“because middle Courtville had overflowing drains and the water kept ending up in our basement.”

Turning the old building into a fully renovated, combination home and upmarket B&B was a huge mission. “It was in flats for 80 years,” says John. “There were six meter boards at the front door, and four kitchens, all awful. The kauri kitchen benches were a bonus, though.We took them out and used
them in the renovated bathrooms.”

The house has four bathrooms, each with a cast-iron, claw-foot bath as well as a state-of-the-art shower. Anything re-usable has been re-used and the things that couldn’t be - including a long dead and desiccated rat - are kept as relics to “better understand the house”.

John estimates about 50 tradespeople worked on the restoration, along with Sue and himself. “We’ve been intimately involved in every aspect of the job,” says John. “There was a lot of rotten wood in the floors, ceiling and joists. I scoured demolition yards for wood with a profile that matched, or that I could cut a matching profile from.

“All the old gas pipes and 1917 wiring had to be extracted and
the whole house re-wired. The rewiring alone took eight weeks. But the biggest part was getting all the paint, varnish and dirt off the wood. This took four years, using a heat gun and paint stripper.”

They didn’t want to sand the wood, because that would have
removed the patina of age, says Sue.“It has been laborious, but the finished effect is glorious. The wood just glows, especially if you light it properly.”

The Sweetmans filled the house with people to help them pay
the mortgage as they scraped, stripped, polished and painted.
“Lots and lots of people joined our family. Most of the time,
we had six to eight, staying for anything from a couple of nights to a couple of years.”

Researching the history of Braemar has been a passion for Sue. From 1917, when the Ziman family, who had been
leasing the house,moved out and Braemar was converted into flats, it has been home to many people. One was Jean Batten’s father, who lived there for 40 years. Another was Derek Gallagher, who remembers Batten visiting when he was a child. The Sweetmans learned of this connection when they handed out invitations to a blessing of their house after church at All Saints in Parnell. Gallagher, a member of the
congregation, told them he had lived at Braemar with his mother in one of the front rooms. He was six when Jean Batten came to visit, and he said he thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, in her white flying gear, says Sue.

Sue has unearthed many documents, photographs and letters
relating to the house and the people who lived there. The
Alexander Turnbull Library had Jacob Ziman’s letters and
manuscripts. Potter and Stanton had rent books giving the names of people who had resided in the building since 1917. Auckland City archives, valuers’ field books and the Land Transfer Office have all yielded pieces of the puzzle.

“I was quite lucky when I was researching the history,” says
Sue,“because the Kenderdine family took so long to dispose of the property that their probate lapsed. They had to prove land
ownership from the time of the Crown grant from Governor
Hobson, so everything was nicely recorded at the Land Transfer Office right up to 1901.”

Hard as the job was, there was more fun than frustration, say
the Sweetmans. Braemar is a lovely place to live. It’s spacious and elegant, warm in winter and cool in summer. Sue has her office on the second floor, and John records his Classic Hits voice-overs each day in a studio in the basement. And a changing roll of guests enjoys the accommodation of the three official guestrooms.