– Linda Beazley is selling a prime beachfront property in Mount Maunganui, spanning three titles.
– The land, valued over $20m, offers potential for a luxury development or private estate.
– The property has historical significance, once hosting a Miss New Zealand contest and featuring a renowned pool.
The year was 1965 and Miss New Zealand contestants were dangling their legs in a Mount Maunganui pool while being serenaded by celebrated New Zealand guitarist Peter Posa, best known for his instrumental hit The White Rabbit.
This is part of Linda Beazley’s prized childhood memories – she also provided a picture of her glamorous mum Doreen, now in her 90s, reclining by the same pool wearing a splendid beehive hairdo.
“Mum had done some modelling and was delighted to be asked to host a Miss NZ contest,” recalls Linda.
It was a nice day and Linda, aged about eight, remembers thinking how odd it was none of the contestants had a dip. “Of course they didn’t, because of the beehives.”
The pool is gone now but the property – more than an acre of prime waterfront land – is for sale.
65, 67 and 69 Oceanbeach Road covers 4866sqm and have a combined RV of over $20m. Photo / Supplied
One of Linda Beazley’s prized photos from the 1960s shows the spot in its heyday. Photo / Supplied
Linda says the offering is the largest private block of absolute beachfront ever offered on the coastal stretch where some of Tauranga’s most expensive homes have since been built.
It spans three titles, 65, 67 and 69 Oceanbeach Road, which Linda says have a combined RV of over $20m.
The opportunity to the buyer is “unprecedented”, she says, with wide frontage and sweeping views across the Pacific Ocean.
“For the visionary, it offers multiple possibilities. It could once again be a grand private estate with gardens, pool and architectural statement residence.
“It could become a boutique luxury development centred around resort-style amenities, or it could be held as a rare generational asset, one of the last and largest of its kind in New Zealand.”
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Back when Linda’s dad, the late Barry Beazley, met her mum in the 1950s the Mount was still raw, she says.
“Sandhills tumbled down to the surf and only a handful of houses dared to break ground so far from town.”
The family story was that her dad bought the land for well under £10,000, back before New Zealand adopted decimal currency in 1967.
Barry was a pioneer of New Zealand’s building industry and went on to establish Beazley Homes (the jingle went Easily a Beazley Home) which he later sold to Fletcher Building.
The three properties sit on one of the country’s most expensive beach strips. Photo / Supplied
By the late 1960s, Linda says her father was shipping his solid-rimu transportable homes nationwide.
“Back in the day he was New Zealand’s biggest home builder and he was erecting 300 houses a year and popping them off around the country and the house that’s on the property is the first Beazley home.”
Doreen helped with the interior design of the simple, three-bedroom, one-bathroom homes known for their hip roofs, homes that Linda says came to define the Kiwi dream of being affordable, enduring and practical.
“At the time, they were low-cost, affordable housing for people post-war, but they’ve got a little bit of an iconic status now. If someone says it’s a Beazley home, it’s always got a rimu floor.”
Her creative mother turned the surrounding dunes at Mt Maunganui into a lush, exotic garden that became a landmark in its own right – and it was Doreen who added what Linda says was one of the Bay of Plenty’s first resort-style pools.
The “vast” kidney-shaped pool was five metres deep with a diving board, slide, and a natural hot spring-fed spa.
The main house as it stands now. Photo / Supplied
“The house and pool featured in magazines across New Zealand, even playing host to the Miss New Zealand contest.”
In 1973, when Beazley Homes was sold, the family moved to the Gold Coast, but the Mount remained their retreat, though their home was sold – almost – once before.
Linda says a developer bought the property but went broke and the block reverted to her parents, but not before the developer cut down a lot of the big trees and the pool was lost.
“It came back. It didn’t want to go, but now it’s time to go,” says Linda, who now lives in Auckland, as does Doreen.
The decision to sell up has been a hard one, she says. This was the house she was taken to after her birth at Tauranga Hospital, and she remembers roaming all over the property, which in those days was on its own on the sandhill.
“I was sent out with the dog to play and did so my whole childhood. It is really sad. I would love to be able to just hold on to it but it’s got to a point where it needs some tender loving care – it needs someone to take it to the next level.
“We’ve held on for a long time with nothing in mind except we couldn’t bear to let it go.”
– 65, 67 and 69 Oceanbeach Road, Mount Maunganui, Tauranga, is for sale, tender closing February 12