Offshore owners appear to have given up on the ‘Shit-Show Chateau’ at 47 London Street, despite a high-profile renovation attempt by students in 2013.
The five bedroom, solar-panelled flat, that Harcourts euphemistically dubbed a “prime development opportunity,” is up for auction on 5 September.
The 2013 residents also saw the property as a do-up job and launched a renovation project called “P-Lab to Penthouse”.
When they started, the place had no proper foundations, “no insulation, no form of heating, more holes than Lucky Seven, dicks erected on every wall and a solid level of general grottiness,” said two of the six tenants Lindsey Horne and Ellen Sima in a 2013 Critic article. It had been voted Dunedin’s Worst House in 2012, but they agreed to rent the flat for $500 and supply free labour if the landlord supplied materials.
The goal was to create a low-carbon, energy efficient home and draw attention to the poor state of student housing. They held working bees with friends and managed to draught-proof the house, insulate the floor and roof, install a wood pallet burner, spray for mould and clear vines from the property. Horne told The Wireless, “the amount of work [was] proportional to the amount of beer we [provided] at the end.”
Their campaign was picked up by national media including Breakfast, Radio New Zealand, Classic Hits, and the Otago Daily Times. But, by the end of the year the flat was still in bad condition. The tenants had moved more into advocacy, aiming to empower students to get landlords to do up their properties. They collaborated with OUSA on student resources, worked on the Blueskin Resilient Communities Trust Cosy Homes initiatives and contributed to Dunedin City Council discussions about a ‘Warrant of Fitness’ scheme for rental properties.
At the end of 2013, some of the tenants spoke at Festival of the Future and were selected for Live the Dream, a ten-week social enterprise incubator project at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts in Wellington. The incubator produced Rate My Flat, the website where tenants can rate their flats on criteria like price, warmth, landlord and location.
Although when they left the flat was still far from healthy, they did convince their landlord to make thousands of dollars worth of improvements. However, it appears there is still much work to do. Let’s see if there’s a buyer willing to take it on come September 5th.