Cashing in on the ‘heritage dividend’: Why Urban Collective doesn’t bulldoze and replace old buildings

Sunday, 18 May 2025

Down the Three Lamps end of Ponsonby Road, with views of the Sky Tower and St Mary’s Bay, are to be 12 luxury apartments, each of them worth several million dollars.

And while they will be fitted out with the best in kitchen and dining furnishings, their value includes the sum developers Urban Collective have spent maintaining the 119-year-old building that spans the corner of Ponsonby Road and Pompallier Terrace.

Urban Collective director Kelly McEwan says the project, which spans about an acre and weaves together two large buildings and a former council car park (with new parking to be built underground) is a legacy project for his company.

For his team, it’s essential Ponsonby Rd looks like Ponsonby Rd, with a street front that matches its surroundings, with a mix of commercial and residential use that mirrors how it was 100 years ago.

And for that to work, it has to include the old building – no tearing it down and putting it back up in new material, he says.

“Rebuilding something in its original form is almost pastiche, right, and it's never successful.

“The key thing there is what we call in the heritage service the ‘heritage dividend’ – it's that value-add of people recognising authenticity and effort.”

And their clientele – boomers ready to leave their Ponsonby villa for a Ponsonby apartment – are willing to pay the “heritage dividend”, he says.

“I think your typical buyer here tends to be older in nature, empty nesters – it's actually like a glorified crash pad, really.

“They're selling the big family home, they’re in Europe for the summer or they’ve got a house in Waiheke or Omaha. I don’t want it to sound like a retirement home, but the older you get, we know the more socialising you do, the better it is for you, and and this is a place where people will come to you.

“Family will come and visit you, and you don't need to feel like you need to cook meals, you can just go downstairs.”

The development is intended to be complete by the end of 2026, with the apartments sold by then.

And it’s not just the street-facing part of the development where the heritage effort has been made.

While most of the shops had to be stripped out, one in particular still had its original fittings in relatively good condition, heritage specialist and consultant John Brown says.

Some tiles and even a fireplace were retained to be reinstalled, returning even more character to the space that they originally thought possible.

“So, we're nutters,” McEwan says, laughing.

Someone walking along Ponsonby Rd will feel the effort, he says: the same rhythm of the shop fronts, that each store is the same width, that the windows are arranged cohesively, that the tiles match but each store still has its individuality.

“So a lot of thought has gone into a very complicated facade. But a simple apartment building can look quite brutal, and this we think is elegant and very beautiful.”

The development, Pompallier on Ponsonby, is named for its location, and is a nod to the street’s even older history.

Pompallier Terrace is named after the first Roman Catholic missionary of Western Oceania, Bishop Jean Baptiste Francois Pompallier, who arrived in New Zealand in 1938 and lived in Ponsonby most of his time in Aotearoa, in a home that is still standing on St Mary’s Road.

The corner originally housed the Lambourne and Dewar Furnishing Warehouse, which suffered a devastating fire in 1901 and was rebuilt in 1906.

For Urban Collective, just as important as the new homes and retail spaces is how the development interacts with the street, via a laneway and public green space.

They’re delighted to have taken a “pretty run down, pretty ratty” building, married it with a council car park and five street-facing stores and begun the work to turn it into luxury apartments, public space and underground car parks.

Having an acre to work with is pretty unique, particularly in a region like Ponsonby.

It’s preferable to a typical mixed-use development of residential upstairs and a superette downstairs right on the edge of the road, McEwan says. Laneways and spaces to spend time off the road are a unique offering.

They wanted the Pompallier development to offer much more fluidity between its residential and commercial components, just like it used to be in the 1900s.

“The modern planning system is trying to compartmentalise activity into industry here, living here… that almost breaks down the nature of community interaction,” says Brown.

“What this [development] does, in my view, is that it's sort of bringing community interaction back.”

Keeping all the old and working it into the new is an expensive ordeal, McEwan admits, but they wouldn’t have done it any other way.

“It's complicated to bring modern needs into a historic or heritage building because you're trying to get modern circulation, lifts, you've got certain stair requirements and all sorts of things under the new building code, new building standards, the fire code.

“But we wanted to keep as much as we could, it's part of what makes the building beautiful and good.”

He expects the work, particularly where Urban Collective was able to buy the council car park while also retaining public space and parking areas, will be held up as a “gold standard” for developers, but he’s concerned it’s not easy enough to do.

“I think the problem is that to build medium density has got so hard and so costly with building regulation and consenting that you're not really going to get any more of these outcomes at all with the current policies,” says McEwan.

“We've tried to build apartment buildings and it takes four to five years now, and we used to do it in 18 months, 24 months. That's a lot of capital for a really long time exposed to a lot of market fluctuation, and it's very hard to get investors involved.

“That's why you're getting slums out there because developers have got to build something cheaper and it’s easier to just go out there and build rows of townhouses.”

Urban Collective partnered with firms Fearon Hay and Paul Brown Architects on the buildings.

The work has two stages: the Ponsonby Rd side with its retail and 12 luxury apartments and landscaped courtyard above the parking lot, followed by a multi-storey build with smaller apartment units, to replace a disused office building, currently housing the development headquarters.

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