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