Legacy bid fails for cash

Author Margaret Mahy’s former home will be put on the market again after a local group failed to raise the funds needed to transform it into a community asset.

Mahy’s daughter, Bridget Mahy, owns the house in Governors Bay and put it up for sale in May.

She had been in negotiations since then with a group led by local resident and former Christchurch Writers Festival director Morrin Rout, which wanted to buy the house for the community.

But the group could not raise enough money for the plan, so Bridget Mahy will put the property back on the market later this year.

The celebrated children’s author built the house in 1968 and lived there, raising her children and writing many popular books until her death in 2012. It has a rating valuation of $640,000.

Bridget Mahy said it was a ‘‘bit of a shame’’ that the local group was not able to raise the money.

The group had hoped to preserve the home and use it for school groups and perhaps a writers’ residency programme.

‘‘It was a tough job for them to find the necessary funding,’’ she said.

‘‘I wanted to give them an opportunity but it looks like it was a step too far. I am going to put it on the open market and move on.’’

She said the house would be back on the market in November or December. She had hoped that funding could be found to preserve the home and make it a legacy project for her mother.

‘‘I was hoping that someone out there in the wider Canterbury community would be interested.

‘‘It is not possible without money.’’ But she said while she appreciated the group’s efforts to turn it into a legacy project in her mother’s name, there already is one – the Margaret Mahy playground in central Christchurch.

Rout declined to comment. In May, Rout said the home was a special place that was worth preserving.

‘‘The remarkable thing about Margaret’s house is she built it here and lived in it all her adult life with her children, so it is a home utterly imbued with her personality.’’

Penny Mahy, Mahy’s other daughter, said in May that the house had about 170 metres of shelving for her mother’s book collection.

‘‘I grew up there and have a lot of memories.

‘‘The house was built in stages. ‘‘We started with two rooms and a corridor and an outside toilet.

‘‘She helped dig out the foundations by hand. She would never have wanted to live anywhere else. It was very much her place in the world.’’