Harvest of houses from fields of stone

Rebecca MacCormick was watching carefully as builders got to work in the old Mt Wellington quarry.

Each weekend she could see the new suburb taking shape while she took her daughters to games at the Auckland Netball Centre across the road.

The medical centre manager was impressed.

Last year she sold her Greenlane townhouse and moved into a two-storey red brick terraced home with twins Sarah and Olivia and their two cats and a dog.

Eight months on she is full of praise for the Stonefields development, especially her art deco-style four-bedroom house overlooking a neighbourhood park.

"I really like the type of housing - they're a great design," she says. "It's safe, secure and it fits our needs."

Fiona Raines moved into a double-storey villa on the opposite side of the park last September with her husband Kelly, sons Jacob, 7, and Riley, 2, and their dog, Pepper.

They had also kept an eye on building work from their home in nearby Mt Wellington before deciding to move to Pakuranga instead. But they soon found the new house was too far away from Jacob's school in Remuera.

The 36-year-old mother says the family moved partly for the location - her husband works just up the road at his IT business in Marua Rd and cycles to work in summer - but also to live in a safe, friendly community.

Over summer Kelly and the boys played soccer and cricket in the park across the street, while Jacob can now ride his bike with friends around the quiet network of local streets.

"We've had a few get-togethers in the community. It's been really good for meeting people."

After years of urban planning nightmares and a building slump which is hitting most of the industry hard, Stonefields looks like Auckland's chance to get it right.

The $2 billion-plus development is by far the biggest to start from scratch in the middle of well-established city suburbs - a 110-hectare sunken plain the size of downtown Auckland.

At this stage the site consists of a four-lane main road to and from St Johns, a network of streets and earthworks across the old quarry floor and 74 villas and terraced homes in several blocks at the city end.

But when it is finished in about seven years developers Landco and main builders Fletcher Residential are promising to build homes for 6500 people - about the same population as Morrinsville - in 2900 houses and apartments.

The suburb will have its own primary school for up to 500 children, due to open in 2011, and a local shopping centre by the end of that year.

Landco managing director Evan Davies says he's well aware that his company has a rare opportunity to create something from nothing.

"It's slightly unusual that somebody is attempting to transform this scale of area into a community all at once," says the former Sky City chief executive, who joined the development firm last year. "Traditionally things have happened in a rather more ad hoc, sporadic manner."

The site has a long history. Maori occupation here goes back 600 years, with a fortified village at the base of the mountain. The name Stonefields comes from the walled gardens the first Polynesian settlers built to protect their crops.

In 1936 Winstones turned the site into a quarry, which produced about half the stone products used in city building projects for the next 65 years, including concrete for the Auckland Airport runway.

Winstones, now a Fletcher-owned company, sold the quarry in 2001 to Landco, which will develop the whole site and sell most of the sections back to Fletchers' home building division, Fletcher Living.

The project is particularly ambitious considering many building projects in the region are struggling in the economic downturn. The construction start date for a new town centre for 40,000 people at Flat Bush in Manukau City has been pushed back to 2011 and a grand plan for a $500 million high-rise "super city" in Albany looks unlikely to go ahead.

Yet Stonefields appears to be on target and even ahead of expectations. Davies says his company will finish at the site by the summer of 2010/11, close to its original October deadline.

Fletcher Residential general manager David Halsey boasts his firm has sold 196 homes at the development, including 46 places worth $30 million in total in the past three months.

Fletchers plan to build another 118 homes over the next year, completing the College Rd side and covering about half the old quarry floor. Halsey says since sales took off early this year the company has sold every house it's built and can't keep up with demand.

It's a big turnaround for a development which started life with a serious image problem. For many Aucklanders, especially in the neighbouring eastern suburbs, the idea of living in the old quarry has always seemed bizarre.

Why would anyone want to live in a hole? And most importantly for a city that lives by suburb rankings, which way would Stonefields swing demographically - to the posh eastern suburbs or to working class Mt Wellington, Panmure and Glen Innes?

The first perception is a sensitive one for the developers. Halsey even insists on meeting the Herald at the new houses on the quarry floor, rather than viewing the development from the cliff edge. His point - which turns out to be true for homes at the northern end - is that the site is big enough not to feel submerged when standing there.

As for the climate, local Auckland city councillor Toni Millar remembers how the quarry workers got so cold in winter that they could not stop their hands shaking.

But she thinks having a few thousand people living there should even out the temperature extremes in winter and summer.

The Eastern Bays councillor admits she was not originally a fan of the development - she favoured a sports ground - but says the houses are proving popular, even though you can't get anything for less than $600,000.

Those high prices, with the promise of quality to match, suggest the development will also pass the desirability test. Stonefields is targeting the affluent eastern suburbs and seems to be succeeding.

The terraced homes, which range from $595,000 to $735,000, are solidly built and roomy, with expansive kitchens and tandem garages. The four and five bedroom villas, which sell from $730,000 to $795,000, are more formal and even more substantial.

Built in a mix of weatherboard and bagged brick - brick with a plaster and paint finish - they have less open space than most older properties but still manage a small backyard.

Despite its newness, the whole development has a middle-class, old-fashioned feel, designed to appeal to higher income buyers.

Halsey rejects the upmarket label but confirms the basic strategy: "We aim the price point at the current market, so people should be able to sell their existing house in St Heliers and move into here on an equal basis."

Stephen Hart, publisher of Where to Live in Auckland, thinks Stonefields has location firmly on its side.

"There are places like Flat Bush where it's a very real concern about which way it might turn out. But if you're building in the central eastern suburbs, it's going to augur well."

ROOM FOR GREEN SPACE

Homeowners in the new suburb will use recycled rain water for their toilets and gardens.

The former quarry makes a natural sink, with water pooling at the bottom, so Landco has built three ponds at the deepest point under the cliff face at Lunn Avenue.

Rainwater will be treated and stored in the ponds, then pumped out through two pipes across Ngahue Rd and across the golf course. A third pipe will send water back up the College Rd hill and recycle it around the suburb.

On top of the five-hectare wetlands reserve around the ponds - touted by the developer as a future haven for bird life - the company is building eight neighbourhood parks within a five-minute walk from every home.

These were supposed to be ready as builders finished the houses but thanks to delays at Auckland City Council, the first is still a month away and work is starting on the second.

The council's city development general manager, John Duthie, says a combination of factors - weather, consent issues and the economic downturn - led to the problem, which is now resolved.

Auckland Institute of Architects' urban planning group chairman Shannon Joe says the development seems to be based on good design principles. His only reservation is whether the neighbourhood parks are visible enough from roads around Stonefields to be seen as truly public spaces, rather than the private areas created by gated communities in the past decade.