104 | LIFESTYLE Summerset Group Holdings: Mt Denby T T Kelly Deeks Resort-like retirement living on offer Summerset’s first village in Northland, Summerset Mt Denby, brings resort-like retirement living to Whangārei with spacious and contemporary homes and facilities including indoor swimming pool, all-weather bowling green, and residents’ bar, all within 200m of local shops and amenities. Summerset national construction manager Peter Savoy says this 11ha site just off the Kamo bypass and next-door to Whangārei Golf Club is a fantastic location for a retirement village. “Our main building which goes up three stories is going to have wonderful views towards the golf course, down the first tee and across the gully,” he says. “It’s a pretty special spot.” With construction on the main building recently started, the village was launched and residents started moving in to their brand new villas in November 2021. Once completed, Peter says sometime in 2026, the village will have 213 two and three-bedroom villas as well as 76 serviced apartments in the main building, which also houses rooms in Summerset’s care centre and apartments in its innovative and industry leading memory care centre. Peter says a lot of design work has gone into making these apartments homely, while conforming to dementia-specific design principles. Big, bold, and beautiful murals which are different in different parts of the building help residents at the later stages of dementia to understand where they are, and the use of contrasting colours on fixtures and fittings facilitate perception and help residents to recognise objects in their environment. Summerset has been honing its unique development process since the construction of its first village in 1997 and today, it runs like a well-oiled machine, albeit navigating bumps in the road. Summerset is the client, the designer, and the main contractor on all of its projects, allowing the team to hit the ground running at every step of the process, and to learn and retain every lesson from every project. Peter says when Summerset starts working in the regions, it is usually starting a team from scratch. That includes the team of staff at the village, as well as the group of contractors to deliver the build. “We do a lot of pre-planning from about 18 months before we start on site, and this includes a lot of market research to see what the resource market looks like for our staff and our contractors. At Mt Denby, we started on site late 2020 and at the time, resource markets were very, very busy. Contractors were busy and we ended up getting a mix of 80% local and 20% from other parts of the country. The residential market, which was extremely challenging at the start, is now starting to slow down and contractors who weren’t interested in us three years ago are now seeing us as a good option for opportunity in the market.” Construction is going well on site with the only challenges coming from this year’s multitude of wet weather events. “These cyclones and flooding events have been really tough for the communities, but everyone wants to get back to normal as soon as possible. Just like when we came back from Covid, the response from the supply chain was awesome. Everyone wanted to get back to work and back to normality.” Summerset continues to deliver more villages than any other retirement operator in New Zealand, with 17 sites currently at various stages of development nationwide. Five pieces of land in Australia are also going through the development phase and units at Summerset’s first Australian village, Summerset Cranbourne North, are set to be delivered at the end of this year. Summerset Mt Denby will host an open day on July 23. “Our main building which goes up three stories is going to have wonderful views towards the golf course, down the first tee and across the gully.” RMM enjoy a creative working partnership with Summerset Group Holdings.
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