Grand designs

The room which hosted Whangarei's
leading citizens and most important
visitors for much of the 20th century  _
 including Queen Elizabeth and the Duke
of Edinburgh in 1953 _ is back in
business after being used as a store
room.

The venue is the lounge or reception
room at the 109-year-old  Grand Hotel in
lower Bank St.

The first function in the room after
several years of being a glorified
cupboard was a farewell party  last
Saturday. The small private bar, with
art deco leadlight window, also
reopened last week.

The hotel's grandest moment was
when the royal couple stayed two nights
in December 1953 and provided the best
photo opportunity a hotel could wish for
by waving to a crowd of thousands from
the first-floor balcony. 
In the decades since, the hotel's
grandeur gradually faded and recent
managements have had to work hard to
find an appropriate identity for the
 

various arms (accommodation, bars,
dining room and lounge) of what is
arguably the city's top heritage building
and longest-running business.

The cold breath of developers was felt
from time to time as owners struggled to
 

find a viable future for the Grand, but
not since it had the luck to catch the eye
of Whangarei investor Vic Hill. 

He has had his struggles  since buying
the hotel in 1994 but demolition has
never been on his list of preferred
options. Nor is it likely to be:  he is
pouring hundreds of thousands of
dollars into seismic strengthening and
improvements.
The reception room was the first part
of the hotel to be strengthened.
Refurbishment was completed last
week.
The adjacent room  will be available
for a dance floor when the fine wooden
floor has been resanded.  The floor's
potential was  discovered only when the
carpet was pulled up recently.
Work has now begun on The Zone
public bar, where concrete foundations
and floor-to-ceiling concrete wall
sections threaded with steel bars for
seismic strengthening are partially
complete. 
A worker  who has had to crawl
around underneath the hotel said  he had
noted plenty of fragments of old glass
and pottery (the first hotel burned down
in 1899) but the Grand will keep its
secrets _  he didn't want  to stay down
there any longer than he had to.
 
 Next on the list for strengthening is
the former hotel dining room, now
housing the Grand Thai Restaurant.
The restaurant will be closed in January
for the work.
Mr   Hill says financing the
 strengthening and other essential
repairs  had been hugely challenging but
he could not face the alternative _
 demolition.
He likes old buildings and says
Whangarei has all too few of them. And
he says: ``At the end of the day, this one
has been good to me.''
Little had been done to the building's
fabric and furnishings when it was
leased out in the 1990s. The decision to
say ``yes'' to a future for the building by
carrying out the required  work meant
these issues also had to be addressed to
make the business viable.
The bedrooms were being
refurbished; the After-Five house bar
had been redecorated and reopened;
 there was a new roof and water damage
to the ornate ceiling over the grand
staircase would be repaired when the
stairwell was strengthened.
Mr  Hill says he and new manager
Dale Pullen had decided to aim for a
Grand that was warm and welcoming
with the ambience of a fine old country
pub, with venues available at
reasonable prices. The target clientele
for accommodation was overseas
visitors looking for clean and
comfortable rooms in a central location,
near shops and restaurants.
Accommodation and function use was already building again, despite the work
continuing.

Mr  Hill might still have a lot of
cheques to write but he is optimistic that
the Grand will be successfully
reinvented.
 
 
 
 
THE OTHER RED SHED:  Whangarei's homegrown bargain
supremos Arthur and Toby Brasting of
Arthur's Emporium plan to put up a new
building twice the size of their existing
base by the end of this year.
Manager Toby Brasting, son of
founder Arthur, is impatient to get
going but says it is taking time to work
through the consent processes.
The present site is near arterial route
Walton St, spanning Clyde and Albert
Sts. The new building will go two doors
up in Albert St, on what used to be the
carpark of the IC Motors workshop (a
600sq m building on a 1500sq m site).
The Brastings snapped up the
workshop when IC Motors put all its
property  in the Walton St area up for
sale before  moving to a new  Port Rd
base last year.

Toby Brasting says once consents are
through, things will happen quickly.

With the planned building a simple
tin shed, construction would take a
fraction of the time it had taken to get
the project through the consent process,
he says. Moving  stock was expected to
be achieved in a  day because the new
building was so close.

The Clyde St end of the old building
will be demolished and the space
merged with the existing Emporium
parking area to create a 40-space park.
The Albert St end of the building will be
retained as the fabric shop.
Further up the street the old
workshop also stays, as storage.

Toby Brasting says he will unveil a
new logo and a new slogan to
underscore the Emporium's local
origins and ownership, for the side of
the new building.
The big question is whether to stick
with a red colour scheme or to leave the
small red shed look behind and go for
the blue of the firm's adjacent building
_  blue because there happened to be a
lot of blue paint in stock at the time.
Founder Arthur Brasting, following what
Toby calls ``a complete reconditioning''
(knees, heart), has taken a step back in
the business to occupy the role of
property management director.

Arthur's Emporium is billed on its
website as a retailer of haberdashery,
handcraft supplies and surplus goods,
with goods as varied as artist supplies and
fancy dress; toys and tools;  fabric and
wallpaper; knives and swords; and
camping, electrical, kitchen, gardening
and fishing equipment _ and anything
else the Brastings have sourced from
around the country.  
HRV COMES TO CBD: Former Whangarei man Marcus Foot,
managing director and co-founder of the
fast-growing franchise operation HRV
Ventilation, has bought the former IC
Motors building in Walton St, in the
Whangarei CBD. 
The former vehicle showroom has
been partitioned for two tenants. HRV
Whangarei will move into the side
nearest Clyde St within the next few
weeks while a tenant is still being
sought for the other half of the building,
on the corner of Walton and Albert Sts.
HRV Whangarei director Anthony
Lock said the business had outgrown
the Port Rd premises it had occupied
since opening in the city two years ago.
There are about 25 employees.
The franchise covers  Northland, from
Waiwera north.
HRV was set up only five years ago
and already has 20 franchises in New
Zealand and another five in Victoria,
Australia. Mr  Foot now lives in
Auckland.