After building their dream home almost 50 years ago, Mike and June Steenson are moving out.
The unique house, on a 1000sqm corner section on Graham St in Tinwald, has been referred to by many over the years as a ‘‘castle’’. It has a turret, medieval features and moat-like swimming pool.
Now the castle’s king and queen are moving on, after the house sold for $705,499. The price is more than $100,000 above its CV, and a lot more than the cost of the land and build of $30,000.
The house was designed by noted Christchurch architect David Allen.
Mike, 81, and June, 76, brought their two daughters up there, and today have four grandchildren.
Mike is a retired truck driver and builder by trade. He built the home with the help of friends, after the couple embarked on an architectural adventure when they were in their 20s in the mid-1970s.
The couple spoke to OneRoof about the journey.
Mike said Allen, who had a growing following at the time, had been ‘‘a bit of a dreamer’’.
‘‘As you can tell by the shape of our home,” Mike said. “He liked way-out houses.”
When the Steensons first visited Allen, he dismissed the collection of photographs and brochures they had brought with them to help explain what they were looking for.
“He looked at them and said ‘Do you want me to design a house or don’t you?’ That was the long and the short of it.”
Mike Steenson was working with Crum Brothers brickworks in Ashburton and had amassed 10,000 bricks on his property.
“I said (to architect David Allen), ‘You’ve got to build a house around those 10,000 bricks’,” Mike told OneRoof.
Three months later the couple were invited back to Allen’s Christchurch office.
“He wasn’t there but there was a sketch laid out on the desk. I said to June, ‘Oh, that’s a classy looking house, I wonder whose it is’? She replied, ‘You’d better have another look because it’s got your name written on it’.”
Plans in hand, Mike and June set about building the home. Mike did his own quantity surveying, which led to a problem.
The banks said he wouldn’t be able to build the home as cheaply as he claimed and refused to lend the couple money.
“We were at the stage where we thought, if we don’t get the money in the next couple of weeks we were going to pack up and go to Canada,” he said.
Luckily, Mike ran into “the guy who was allocating the money at South Canterbury Savings Bank” and he walked him through the couple’s plans.
“A couple of days later he rang up and said, ‘There’s $20,000 being transferred into your banking account right this minute, you better get cracking’.”
Everyone pitched in on the build. “June was a big help, and the in-laws and my workmates used to come over here on the weekends,” Mike told OneRoof.
“It was a joint effort. Like when we were putting the tower together on the front. It’s built with 3000 bricks.
“A mate of mine used to come around every morning and we’d mix a bit of concrete and put it down between the two layers of inner and outer bricks. Then we’d lay bricks all day and the next morning we’d do the same thing again.”
Mike is proud of the secret room he built upstairs. Having an “Annie’s Room” was a family tradition.
His mother had a similar secret Annie’s Room constructed at the family’s Hamilton farm to keep her treasures in.
The Ashburton secret room, created above a false floor, housed the hot water cylinder. The home contains some interesting relics, including a brass doorknob salvaged from the Waitaki River.
“My brother-in-law was working for Oamaru Readymix Concrete, and they were out on the Waitaki River screening shingle, and he saw this big brass doorknob pop out of the shingle.”
The spire on the top of the castle section was the last piece of woodturning Mike’s father did before he died.
“Back in the 1930s he had built a wood lathe and did a lot of woodturning: making egg cups, standard lamps and fruit bowls. The architect referred to it as the Uncle Frightener or Seagull Frustrater,” he told OneRoof.
The couple moved in once the roof and walls were up. “A builder’s house is a bit like a mechanic’s car,” Mike said.
“It never quite gets finished. It’s been good to retire because I have tidied up all these jobs and I’m quite pleased with what I’ve done, although somebody else is going to get the benefit of it really. It’s stuff I should have done 20 years ago.”
June has kept the gardens lovingly over the years. The couple have bought another home in Ashburton as they begin their twilight years.
