Recovery position

For Suzanne Price, Recovery Programme Manager for Church Property Trustees (CPT), a desire for heritage protection developed from an acute sense of loss.

It was while on a drive through her hometown of Kaiapoi, outside Christchurch, after being away studying veterinary science at Massey University, that she noticed the old library was gone.

“The council had demolished the library; my library. I’d virtually lived there as a child and I couldn’t believe that the beautiful triple-brick building wasn’t there anymore. I just cried.”

Her next trip back to Christchurch was ruined as well. “I drove past St Bede’s College and was appalled to see the beautiful façade of St Bede’s had vanished. It had always made such an impression on me as I drove past. It was always there, and then one day it wasn’t.”

Once again, she felt the loss of something beautiful and completely unrecoverable.

The experiences had a huge impact on Suzanne, and when deteriorating hearing forced a move from veterinary school to property management and valuation, she was determined that any heritage building that came her way would be given a chance.

“Everyone looks at the economics of restoring old buildings, but it shouldn’t rule the decisions. No matter where you live, there will be heritage buildings that are important to your community and there is a huge sense of loss once they go, because you can’t get them back,” she says.

In the mid-1980s, as one of only a handful of women in the property development and management industry, Suzanne became the first woman to join the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA), now the Property Council of New Zealand. She remembers the day she derailed a BOMA meeting that was being held at the Wellington Club. “Women weren’t allowed in, so they had to change the venue for future meetings.”

The work was hard but the challenges exciting. She enjoyed the theory behind valuations and early on was given some internal fit-out projects to manage. “And suddenly, she who was never going to work in an office was really enjoying it,” she laughs.

Suzanne’s early projects in Christchurch involved finding new office venues, fitting them out and then moving sales agents into their new, open-plan offices.

With decades spent working in the property sector and a long-held love of heritage spaces, Suzanne Price had the right set of skills to lead one of Canterbury’s biggest earthquake recovery efforts

WORDS: KIM TRIEGAARDT • IMAGERY: KIRSTEN SHEPPARD

Another project involved a small office and retail development that required the demolition of the Crystal Palace Theatre, which came down virtually overnight. “It was a look into the corporate preference, which was to knock down a building because they could do something bigger and better at far less expense,” she says.

Suzanne’s longstanding interest in heritage buildings was given a boost when she worked in the North Island for a company that had a large stock of old buildings whose owner had a passion for them. “Where other people would put them in the too-hard basket, he loved them. He would buy them, give them a makeover and put in a new business, or restructure the old business. He gave these old buildings a whole new, vibrant lease on life.”

It is this ability to create new life from old that has kept Suzanne accepting commissions to retrofit and strengthen heritage buildings. Her experiences have also strengthened her faith in heritage restorations.

“I’m not fazed by the extent of the work it might take to fix a building, because I’ve seen how it’s possible to transform a building,” she says.

It was the huge portfolio of earthquake-damaged heritage buildings that attracted Suzanne to her role with CPT, which holds and administers the property and investments of the Anglican Diocese of Christchurch and is one of the largest private owners of heritage-listed buildings in New Zealand. Of the 75 heritage buildings in a portfolio of more than 280, 56 had quake damage of varying degrees.

“It was an opportunity to really use my skills in heritage and background in property management to get things to stack up from a numbers point of view. I’ve been able to look at a building and say, ‘Hey, that is actually manageable – that can be saved’.”

This means putting strategies, reviews and alternative plans into place that are contrary to the initial repair schemes, which were undertaken at the time CPT was negotiating insurance payouts after the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.

With many of the old parish churches facing depreciated insurance payouts, there hasn’t been much spare cash to go around. At St Barnabas (pictured) in the Fendalton parish, the $5.7 million scheme that was initially developed was completely uneconomic, so it meant working with the engineers to revisit the project and propose an alternative.

“We ended up basically with exactly the same result through revisiting the engineering solutions, coming up with something more buildable and saving nearly $3 million in the process.”

Suzanne has had the added challenge of assisting the parishes with fundraising to help restore the churches.

Despite all these challenges, Suzanne appreciates the unique situation in which she finds herself. “It’s not very often you get to work on a series of buildings dating from 1855 through the 1880s to the 1900s. Many of the churches carry the signature looks of the region’s eminent architects Benjamin Mountfort and Cecil Wood.

“These are churches that were built with whatever was around, so they are unique. At the Church of the Holy Innocents at Mt Peel, the builders took stones from the Rangitata River and put them in fire and split them with axes. There is nothing else like it anywhere,” says Suzanne.

The restoration of the Church of the Holy Innocents epitomises the level of care and attention to detail that Suzanne takes in her restoration projects.

“While you can still get the same Mt Somers stone that the decorative details of the church were made of, because the quarry where it came from is still there, for it to be the same colour, the stone would need to have been quarried at the same time. Fortunately, we were given access to stone that had been quarried and was

“These are churches that were built with whatever was around, so they are unique”

still sitting there from the time the church was built, so we could match up the stone identically.”

Suzanne says assembling the right team – architects, engineers and builders who understand heritage projects – is the key to making these projects happen.

Heritage New Zealand Conservation Architect Dave Margetts says Suzanne’s strong conviction to save as much of CPT’s at-risk heritage as practically possible is commendable.

“We have been impressed with her ability to lead from within CPT to appropriately assess and make cases for the retention of the most significant and often very damaged heritage church buildings.”

No story on Christchurch churches would be complete without a question about the recovery of the 136-year-old Gothic-style Christ Church Cathedral. Suzanne was involved with the preliminary planning for the reinstatement and was keen to see it saved.

“I’m hopeful I will have a role and I would like to lead the recovery project, but it’s still some way away.”

Uncertainty notwithstanding, the heritage buildings that Suzanne has helped to save so far have gone a long way towards easing the pain of those earlier losses.

Despite having worked on a large number of heritage projects, Suzanne barely hesitates when asked to name her favourite building.

““It’s got to be St Bart’s,” she says fondly. “I grew up in Kaiapoi, and it was the church I attended as a child so I’ve always had a soft spot for it.”

St Bartholomew’s Church is a Category 1 church designed by Benjamin Mountfort and is the oldest wooden church in Canterbury. The church had to be moved off its foundations to allow new ones to be installed and was then moved back again.

“I’ve always loved the interior of the church. It’s not the same as modern churches. There is a sense of the surreal, and mystery. You feel something different from the usual. Also, because Kaiapoi lost so much in the quake, it’s been quite special to work on it and be able to save it.”

Suzanne says that handing it back to the parish in as-new condition following a year of quake repairs and restoration was very satisfying.

St Bartholomew’s Church, Kaiapoi