As well as having a good climate, Nelson has a lot of building sites with views of the water. This shot, for example, is from my front doorway:
Recently we’ve seen quite a lot of building activity in and around our street. Just a short distance away an older house was removed and is being replaced by this modern concrete structure:
It’s going up just in front of one of the last remaining old villas in the street, the much-loved house shown in the image below. Fortunately their verandah is sufficiently high that the new house with its two-storeys plus garage will not block their view very much.
And what a view! I grabbed this chance, before the walls go up, to show what the newcomers will see from their front windows:
or, stepping back a little,
Incidently, these shots were taken yesterday (close to mid-winter) when much of the rest of New Zealand was experiencing bitterly cold gales & snow.
The villa owners however are in a much better situation than the people in the house on the extreme left in the following picture, who will soon get a new neighbour.
Over the past year we have watched as the original building, an old character home that blended in with the rest of the buildings on the hill, was removed and a new structure took shape. It’s certainly a great site, pity about the impact on the neighbours. Fortunately we don’t have to look at it.
Today some locals explained that a rather similar process occurred many years ago, for the house at the very top of the picture. The original house was demolished (an unusual step in those days), the site levelled and the new house built. In that case though the house was dug down into the hill, to minimise it’s impact.
It does tend to reinforce the old adage: “you can’t own a view”. (That is, unless one has enough money.)