You could say woodworker Dennis Conquest has carved his own niche in Raglan.
But now it’s time for this amiable American who came to town in 1968 to surf to finally move on, though ideally not too far from what he calls his life’s work – a four-storey home he painstakingly built on a steep, bush-clad section overlooking Whale Bay.
It was back in 1980 that Dennis bought the 2200 sq m property along Whaanga Rd – then a dirt road – and started crafting the kind of house he dreamt of, inspired by famous United States architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
A model built to scale and designed by Dennis and his children still sits atop the kitchen bench.
When asked when he finished the ambitious project, Dennis answers wryly “about a week ago”.
But at 81 he reckons he just can’t stay put. “My mind tells me I’m not very old but my body doesn’t go along with it,” he laughs. Even getting up and down the stairways, both interior and exterior, is difficult for Dennis these days.
Not that he’s lamenting exactly, acknowledging it’s a great feeling of achievement to have built a house “from start to finish … all by myself”.
He’s constructed not only the house itself – from 27 local macrocarpas he felled and had milled – but also all his own furniture. He’s particularly proud of his kauri dining suite which was repurposed from the rafters of St Paul’s cathedral in Auckland.
Getting the timber on site was a bit of a mission early on, Dennis admits, and he called on the “neighbourhood kids” – among them Dom Gavin, ‘Carcus’ and ‘Daz’ – to help lug it up his rudimentary driveway. Their reward was the use of a half-pipe – the first in the Waikato – he’d built on his property.
Dennis had a long association with skateboarding, having made some of the first decks for the legendary Santa Cruz brand back in America. When he came to Raglan he built and sold his own Powerpoint-brand skateboards.
As a woodworker, he’s turned his hand to many things over the years. “You name it and I’ve tried to make it,” Dennis chuckles.
In the 80s he built up a portfolio and sold his cabinetry in New Zealand through an exclusive furniture store, Chandler House. Then there were the little trinket boxes or chests which were sold in 35 shops throughout the country.
His pieces were made of tea tree and other woods he gathered by the trailer-load off the likes of East Cape beaches.
Also a guitarist – with a designated room in which to jam with local musos – Dennis has turned his hand to making his own percussion instruments, among them some box-shaped Spanish-style cajons from recycled wood which local drummer Freddy Limbert helped design.
But now that age is catching up with Dennis he says he has no choice other than to sell his beloved property – bought 45 years ago for $10,000 – which comes with an orchard and a large garden he’s also now finding hard to maintain.
Alongside the orchard is a sizable workshop where he’s spent much of his time over the decades, even living there for 10 years or so with his kids while they were growing up and the house was still in the early stages of construction.
The workshop was built from recycled timber which Dennis sourced – in pieces – for $100. He put the former Te Hutewai Rd house back together again and still it lives on.
Dennis has family in both Raglan and Gisborne so hopes to maybe buy two more manageable homes here and there, affording him the luxury of flying between coasts on “a trillion airpoints”.
With his reduced mobility he now paddleboards rather than surfs, or hoops along the beach on his fat-tyred e-bike. “My e-bike is my wheelchair,” he half-jokes.
And while he used to flit between Hawaii and New Zealand for surfing, now it’s more likely to be Samoa or Fiji where he can paddleboard, swim, dive and play music.
Dennis is proud of the fact he and ‘Crowie’ – who’s also still in Raglan – were two of the first surfers to live here. He recalls that people like him living so far out of town were once dubbed the Whale Bay “losers”.
He marvels at how much Raglan has changed in his lifetime. “It used to be a hippie spot. Now it’s full of yuppies who want to be hippies,” he observes.
If you’re interested in this property you can contact:
Mark Frost
Residential and Lifestyle Sales
+64 22 150 2244
mark.frost@bayleys.co.nz
