Dream home becomes nightmare for family

Last year, 3024 New Zealand houses were sold in mortgagee sales - a 500% increase on 2007 and the highest number since records began. One of those forced sales involved the Corish family's Otago Peninsula "dream home", which has a rateable value of $3.75 million. Mark Price spoke to a family member about what went wrong.

Fans of the television series Grand Designs will be familiar with the script.

It begins with someone's idea for an unusual, interesting or extravagant home.

Tensions follow as architects and builders try to meet the expectations of the owners.

Then budgets blow out.

And then, somehow, everything turns out all right.

For the Corish family, formerly of Dunedin and now of Oamaru, their grand design at 30 Camp Rd followed the script fairly closely - except for the end.

They have lost their home and a great deal of money besides and their grand bluestone house on the road to Larnach Castle will most likely soon have new owners, who will probably pay somewhat less than the $2.9 million the house cost to build.

A Corish family spokeswoman, who did not want to be named, said the decision to build a 900sq m, two-storey home on their 17ha of land was made in 2005 when they were offered a good price for their former home nearby.

"We had $1.355 million to spend . . . this is going to be marvellous. This is going to be our dream home, mortgage-free."

They employed an architect recommended to them and gave him "some rough things" and asked "Can you build this?"

The spokeswoman said they were led to believe the cost would be $1.35 million, which meant they would have $5000 left over "to go out and have lunch".

"But, knowing what architects are like, we put in a $200,000 contingency which we could get from the bank easily, just in case."

However, there was no "official quotation".

Before building began, a dispute with neighbours over the purpose of the house cost the family $30,000 in legal fees, but that issue was resolved, and in 2005 the build began.

By the halfway stage, in mid-2006, "all the money was gone", the spokeswoman said.

She blamed the architect.

The architect said when contacted it was the first he had heard of his client's dissatisfaction and he denied responsibility for the financial problems the family had encountered.

"That's probably quite an imaginative way of covering themselves in terms of how they got themselves in such an embarrassing situation.

"This was a project that they really ran themselves, you might say... In fact, we were only responsible for a part of the design."

The spokeswoman said the family were advised by their accountant to sell the shell of the half-finished building.