Remember the VBG and Iguacu? A new chic hospitality venue is part of Parnell’s rebirth

Kevin Harvey plans to rejuvenate Parnell with an innovative dining and market venue at 269 Parnell Rise. Photo / Michael Craig

A Parnell developer is hoping to bring back the glory days of the upmarket Auckland strip with a new place where visitors can eat, drink, sing, dance and be merry. Jane Phare drops in on an Auckland building site that will open as a unique hospitality venue later this year.

Kevin Harvey looks more like a dishevelled passer-by who’s wandered onto a building site for a nosy than a rich-lister property owner and landlord.

But Harvey, standing on marble flagstones surveying his vision taking shape at 269 Parnell Rd, doesn’t much care what people think. He just wants the ideas swirling around in his head to become bricks and mortar. And they are, slowly.

His father Les Harvey, dubbed “the founding father of Parnell”, was the same, a visionary in a scruffy Army Surplus jumper and cap. People who saw Harvey senior on his knees planting flowers or laying bricks in Parnell Village before his death 30 years ago often mistook him for a labourer.

Little did they know he was the owner and landlord of more than 100 properties in Parnell and Ponsonby, mostly dilapidated Victorian houses and old shops bought cheaply in the 1970s, which Harvey restored and rented out to commercial tenants. He wanted to save the bungalows from destruction, to create a place of beauty, where sunlight filtered down through trees, where village shops and restaurants were linked by cobbled alleyways, and flowers were allowed to bloom.

That plan also made him a very rich man as Parnell, in the 1980s and beyond, became Auckland’s hip place to hang out. It is Harvey’s legacy, City Construction that was passed to his three children, Kevin, Tom and Nancy. Now Kevin Harvey, 70, who runs the company, wants to leave his own legacy in the form of 269 Parnell.

Harvey's vision, 269 Parnell, is still under construction and is due to open as a hospitality venue later this year. Photo / Michael Craig

To any other seasoned property developer, intent on decent returns on investment, Harvey’s vision might seem a flight of fantasy, a little bit mad even. He’s spending $8.5 million on creating a mostly open-air space where people can come together to eat tapas, sip on a glass of wine, smell the smoky aroma of food being cooked over fire, listen to music, dance the salsa, watch festival movies on quiet nights, attend fashion shows, theatre and opera, and buy market food. He has top chefs lined up, the type who cook for the love of it, he says. He wants a coffee kiosk, a fabulous gelato counter, candelabras and somewhere he can buy a Portuguese custard tart so he doesn’t have to go to the Matakana market.

Near the entrance is a stylish timber-and-glass kiosk for wine and beer in which the permanent food vendors will have a share. Guests will be able to buy a decent-sized glass of wine for $11 and enjoy the ambience, soaking up the sights and smells of street food - Mexican, Portuguese, Italian, Israeli, Lebanese. By his own admission, it’s all quite fanciful; he’s been too extravagant and thinks if he was working for a developer he’d probably get fired, describing 269 Parnell as his “total folly”.

The signs are out and 269 is scheduled to open later this year. Photo / Michael Craig

Signs of Harvey’s folly are everywhere, starting with metres of pale grey Greek marble he’s had made into thick flagstones to cover the vast courtyard and alleyways. A more wily developer would have used concrete but Harvey wants to create a space that is beautiful and will last.

On one wall are Gaudi-like plaster flourishes and curved wrought-iron balconies. There’s a fountain inlaid with paua shell, accoutrements created by Harvey’s brother Tom, and a towering glass ceiling from where a giant mirror ball will cast tiny speckles of light.

In a nod to Spanish designer Antoni Gaudi, Kevin Harvey has created faux finishes and wrought-iron balconies on the wall of what once was the VBG (Veranda Bar & Grill). Photo / Michael Craig

He’s used expensive pressed metal ceilings in places and, in the wine kiosk, $120,000 worth of bespoke steel-framed window joinery. There’ll be a fireplace, maybe two, beautiful lighting in the courtyard and the towering trees behind, and he’s spent $100,000 on retractable awnings given Auckland’s propensity for rain.

On Saturdays, he plans to have a Matakana-style market with 25 vendors selling fresh produce. He talks about chefs cooking over mobile hibachi grills, customers eating whole, cooked artichokes spread on newspaper with a range of dipping sauces. On Sundays, maybe an antiques and collectibles market, he muses.

Harvey wants plenty of places for people to sit and he’s gone overboard there too. Outdoor polished stone bench seats, embedded with glass and gems, are curved in a Gaudi-esque style, and will be heated. Elsewhere enormous pieces of dark timber are being fashioned into stylish long tables and benches, and sealed with resin.

He plans to design small tapas tables that guests can use and points to old-style lamp posts he had made.

“I want it to be an experience, not just [people] coming to eat food.”

‘A little bit of love’

Details are vague about how much it will cost to run or how much money it will make. There’s too much open space and open air to make anywhere near a sensible return on a big chunk of multi-million-dollar Parnell real estate.

Harvey is the first to agree. Take one of the company’s properties in Ponsonby, he says. A “$2.5m build” on a site would bring a return of $500,000. The Parnell venture will return nothing of the sort for the millions invested.

Kevin Harvey wants to leave a legacy in Parnell to follow in the footsteps of his father Les, pictured in the photo in the background. Photo / Michael Craig

He’s not doing it for financial reward, he says, but for emotional reward. He wants to see people gather and be “happy”. The country’s been through a lot, he says. “I think we need a little bit of love, don’t we. We’ve been through so much.”

He’s using ideas and concepts gathered over years of travel through South America and Europe to get the “Parnell feeling” back and to attract more young people to the area. Harvey is astute enough to know that if he doesn’t do something remarkable to draw people other than locals to Parnell – the giant Westfield Newmarket shopping mall is just up the road – his Parnell Rd tenants won’t be happy. Some of them have been with City Construction for 30 years and he has come to view them as friends. But those tenants and friends need foot traffic.

The Parnell that was

For ageing Aucklanders who remember the heady 1980s and beyond, the 269 Parnell site will evoke nostalgic memories of an era when the “village” was a gathering place for the up-and-coming. Harvey’s new wine kiosk sits where Iguacu’s bar used to be, and to the right of the courtyard is where Iguacu’s restaurant was, now the chic Greek restaurant Jerome.

To the left is what was the old VBG (Veranda Bar & Grill) where Auckland’s glitterati and well-heeled professionals would clatter up the steep, outdoor staircase to spend the night drinking cocktails and demolishing bottles of Champagne. There’s a story that the VBG once sold more “Bolly” (Bolinger) in a year than any other venue in the world.

The responsible ones would leave their Porsche or Mercedes convertibles parked on the street overnight, unperturbed by the shocking amounts that showed up on their Diner’s or American Express credit card bills.

It was where A-listers, merchant bankers, lawyers and VIPs – including Princess Anne’s daughter Zara Phillips – hung out, often hosted by the striking Judith “Old Black Lips” Baragwanath. Parnell was the place of the long lunch, so long that it stretched to dinner and into the night. Everyone partied hard, drank too much and spent like there was no tomorrow. But when tomorrow came in the form of “Black Tuesday”, October 19, 1987, stock markets around the world crashed and nowhere harder than New Zealand. It took a while for the great money ship to run out of steam as the young and beautiful drowned their sorrows, but by the early 90s, Bolly sales in Parnell had tanked.

Metropole restaurant and bar was another popular haunt in Parnell's heyday.

Now Harvey wants to restore the VBG space to its former glory, a restaurant where people can eat “steak and potatoes cooked in duck fat”, drink at the bar and stay late. In what was the VBG’s private dining room is a cluttered temporary site office. Harvey’s not one for computers or even putting plans on paper but somehow he makes his team of skilled tradespeople and craftsmen understand what he wants. He didn’t much like the sharp concrete corners on a wall at the back of the site so he had the tradies sand the edges to a curved, pumice-like smoothness. The project is running late but Harvey’s vision for 269 Parnell is definitely on the home straight.

The bronze statue of Les Harvey, dubbed "the father of Parnell" in the courtyard where Tony Astle's fine-dining restaurant Antoines operated for 47 years. Photo Michael Craig

Near the top of Parnell Rise, in a brick courtyard by Payne Tailors, where Tony Astle ran his fine-dining restaurant Antoines for 47 years, is a bronze statue of Les Harvey, kneeling in a garden as he often did, wearing his trademark jumper and cap. The statue was commissioned by Harvey’s three children to honour their father’s memory and what he had created.

Kevin Harvey says 269 Parnell is his way of keeping his father’s dream going. “In a way, it’s my last hurrah.”

Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based business, features and investigations journalist, former assistant editor of NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.