The house that money can't buy By KIM KNIGHT - Sunday Star Times Last updated 05:00 22/11/2009SharePrint Text Size Photos: John SelkirkThe sweet spot: Surrounded by mansions, Paul Firth's ramshackle seafront home, left, at Black Rock, Milford, has million-dollar views that stretch to Rangitoto Island.
PENGUINS NEST under the floorboards. A tame blackbird steals cat biscuits from the kitchen. The exterior hasn't been painted since 1974 – but the council valuation on this North Shore, Auckland, property is $3.7 million.
Owner Paul Firth turns down a potential buyer "at least once a week".
Worst house, best street. Count the country's richest among Firth's neighbours on Kitchener Rd: plastics millionaire Bill Foreman (he drops the paper past most mornings); America's Cup skipper Chris Dickson; art and antiques auctioneer Dunbar Sloane.
And Firth? "I'd say I was a poet."
The property behind his is worth $5.9 million – $2.2m in the building alone, a glass edifice that towers over Firth's place, a three-bedroom wooden house valued at (pause for effect) $100,000.
"Views are two-a-penny," says Firth. "I like the sound of the water."
He is the last of his line. Aged 65, no children, and a lifetime spent on this property where he has farewelled his mother, father, brother and, this winter, his sister Ann.
There is a poem he wrote the day she died. He keeps it on his cellphone, and reads it out loud, a sing-song storyteller with eyes to match the sea view. "Ann has gone, the whales have come, like pilgrim souls they're here..."
And another, for the young friend who will inherit this place when he goes: "Your day comes with a view and many moods to match... south winds skinning the bone."
Firth's is the house that got away. Built in 1921, and purchased by his father in 1944, there were "about a dozen like it" in the stretch between Milford's Thorne and Castor Bays. The first developers moved in with bricks and tiles – "And then gradually, the houses just went. One by one."
Three whales slid by the front door on the Tuesday morning the Sunday Star-Times visited. We first knocked on the gate a fortnight earlier, curious about the ramshackle hut with the jungle of a garden alongside the coastal walkway pocked with McMansions. Firth wrote our number on the side of his house with a piece of chalk and promised to call.
"I'll live here till the day I die," he says. "I think it would be nice to be on a farm, but it is a bit isolated and I'm a social sort of person. You'd be amazed at how many people I've spoken to this morning. Ten people have given me plant cuttings in the last six months."
Some of this year's $9000 rates bill will be paid for by moviemakers. Sam Neill played Mr Jones here for a week, Under the Mountain's good guy, with Rangitoto in a direct line of sight.
Ad Feedback "Isn't it amazing," says Firth. They had lunch together, the unassuming millionaire and the country's most famous actor.
Firth has worked intermittently over the years, in the chemical and horticulture industries, and in Auckland's demolition yards. He fell off a building in 1974 and still has the scars on a bandaged leg. He thought he might have become a mathematician and was studying when his brother, Mark, died of a heart condition, aged 21.
"That changed everything. I was at university, I'd passed in the first year and after that I just passed the odd exam and maybe it had nothing to do with Mark not being here, but..."
There's a picture of Mark in the living room, painted by their father, Clifton Firth (eldest son of the man who established Firth Concrete), who trained at Elam School of Art and became a style photographer, shooting Auckland glitz and glamour from the 1930s to the 1970s.
Once, this coastal house was a hotbed of bohemia. "Clifton would invite people in, and drink, and poor old mother had to feed them." Poet, painter and fabric designer ARD "Rex" Fairburn, and poet and communist newspaper editor RAK Mason were among those who partied here.
Firth remembers his father making a badge for the one-millionth walker along the coastal track and, another time, instructing his wife Melva Martin to call the harbour board and congratulate a captain on his brilliantly lit ship.
"How about telling the other men to light their ships up," Melva apparently said. Firth adopts the voice of a sea-dog and recalls the captain's reply: "Lady, would you tell another woman how to dress?"
As a boy on this beach, Paul Firth looked at the stars through a home-made telescope, sailed in tin canoes and swam off the rocks. Today, the last of the Kitchener Rd Firths lives quietly, drinking tea and wine with visitors, walking his dog Dede, reading the books he buys at auction for $1 a piece – and resolutely refusing to sell his piece of paradise.
Another poem, this one from his father. It's called "A Walk with Paul": "Have you ever noticed the way the waves change their song when you turn the corner and listen? They scud up the beach, calling into the night, to those who were there with us when we started out..."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/news/3085490/The-house-that-money-can-t-buy/I have often wondered about this house as I walk past. It is a little gem that I hope the council has the sense to protect.
