The former Post Office near the bottom of Baldwin St - the steepest street on Earth - is getting a new lease on life.
Business partners and directors of FPO Ltd (Former Post Office) Donald Lewis and Martin Haanen are part way through renovating the 103-year-old building.
Mr Haanen said they had tenants who would be running a cafe and small-scale coffee-roasting business on the ground floor, although they were still waiting for the outcome of a resource consent application.
The upper floor would house an upmarket apartment that would be called the Royal George Apartment and would be rented as short-term visitor accommodation.
The work is being done by Mr Lewis, who is a builder.
Mr Haanen said they were in discussions with the Dunedin City Council about converting another building and associated plumbing on the site for use as public toilets.
The building has previously housed souvenir shops that Mr Haanen thought would have been ''quite seasonal'' and only marginally profitable.
He thought the new business would be much more suited to the site because there were no other cafes in the immediate area but a lot of staff at several nearby care facilities, schools and community organisations.
''And because it is two-fold in terms of coffee roasting and cafe.''
Mr Donald said tourist numbers in the summer were huge and he had counted 16 large tour buses stopping at the bottom of Baldwin St on a single day during summer.
Even in winter there had never been a day when a bus had not stopped to let travellers take a look at Baldwin St, as well as a regular stream of visitors in private vehicles.
Mr Haanen said they would be landscaping the site as well as improving the fire rating and other remedial work that needed to be done to fix previous work done on the building.
The ground floor building work was due to be finished by August 1, Mr Haanen said.
- by Dan Hutchinson
