SCHOOL ZONES:
Mt Eden Normal Primary, double Grammar zone.
CONTACT:
Colleen Strachan, ph 021 283 6194.
FEATURES:
* Plus 2 offstreet.
Ray and Raewyn Guildford feel more like custodians than owners of 16A Ngauruhoe St. It is a house with a lot of history.
Step through the ground floor entrance and you're in a little waiting room with a fireplace. Back in the early 1900s, the original owners designed the roomas a reception parlour where guests could warm themselves as they waited to be greeted.
They built the Arts and Crafts-style house for one of their daughters, with their own house next door to what used to be Metropolitan College.
Ray and Raewyn felt a duty to preserve the character of the home. "It's nice to know you're handing it on and the next owners will look after it and hand it on to somebody else and it'll be here for another 100 years."
Raewyn says when they first walked through the door 10 years ago, the home felt right: "We just knew it was where we needed to live."
Ray loved the location; it was great to walk down to Mt Eden Village for a beer, he says. "It was like an English thing. You know, go down to your local and come home and have a meal. It's beautifully private. We've got our bedroom downstairs and you don't hear a thing -- even that big storm. We didn't even hear it."
In the middle of the city, you can sit out on the deck and listen to wood pigeons and tui, he says: "It's very peaceful."
The house is a grand old character home with tiled gables, three stories and five bedrooms.
Raewyn has loved its warmth and feel, but more than anything she has appreciated its size. The couple have two boys and having room for them to run and play and bring friends over was a relief. The house, she says, is able to absorb everyone.
"It's got a lot of space so if you've got blended families or quite a large family they're not all on top of one another because there are lots of areas to hang out in."
Family life normally revolves around one of the living areas by the kitchen on the ground level, which has concertina windows looking out above other houses to the Waitakeres.
Upstairs are four bedrooms, including an extra large room Raewyn and Ray used as their bedroom before they moved downstairs into what is now a huge master bedroom with room for a mini-lounge.
This room opens out on to expansive decks to the wavy D-shaped pool below and there is a separate dressing room for their clothes.
But after 10 happy years, and with the boys now grown up, Ray says it is time to move on.
Image 1 of 7: 16A Ngauruhoe, Mt Eden. HERALD HOMES
These days it feels like they don't have enough time to fully appreciate the size of the house.
Their older son, Luke, hopes to make a career of cricket and is always off playing matches, and younger son Max is into quarter midget race cars and is off racing whenever he can, plus they have a launch they spend as much time on as possible.
"We will be sad to move on," says Raewyn, "but, you know, it's the next chapter of our lives."
