Addington’s getting a whole new precinct complete with entertainment, food, drink, office space and New York loft-style apartments. Cityscape catches up with The Mill’s mad engineer to find out more.
“If I’m not having fun, I’m doing it wrong.”
Mike King’s idea of fun is something a bit different. He’s leading us through an abandoned theatre office by torchlight, skirting around dilapidated furniture. He takes us out into the stage area and shines his torch up into the trusses, dust falling gently between the enormous timber structure. “Everyone who walks into this building is going to be blown away.”
The building was formerly The Mill Theatre – originally built in 1886 as a flour mill. It’s one of two buildings that form the historic Wood’s Mill complex, and Mike is halfway through giving them a whole new life.
Mike, The Mill’s owner and visionary, is a structural engineer and historic buildings expert from San Diego. He caught one of the first flights to New Zealand after the February 2011 earthquake and set about helping to restore our city in the following years. He’d restored lots of buildings for other people, and wanted to do one for himself, a last hurrah before retirement, so he bought the dilapidated mill buildings in 2016. “My wife looked at me and said ‘I’ve married a madman’.”
Mike has already renovated the smaller of the two huge buildings, stripping its four storeys back to red bricks and native timber joists and piles. “I see it as a New York loft,” he says. “You buy the floor, you do what you want with it.”
Mike’s open attitude to tenancy had surprising results, even for him. “I never in my wildest thoughts, thought here would be a music school downstairs. That’s cool.”
The ground floor is occupied by Sole Music Academy; the first floor is Mike, his team of engineers and a couple of other businesses in a massive open-plan, light-filled office; and the second floor is Millworks, a co-working space for small businesses and freelancers. The top floor is up for grabs.
Most of the building has been meticulously restored, the bricks scrubbed clean, the original wooden sliding doors opening each floor up to the outside world, steel bracing unobtrusively installed at the end. Modern touches include the concrete floors (added for structural strength, soundproofing, and underfloor heating), double glazing (carefully hidden in hand-made wooden joinery), and the glass wall at one end of the top floor, filling the hole made by a falling capstone in the Canterbury earthquakes.
The new structure that joins the two buildings is unapologetically 21st Century: all glass panes, charcoal joinery and cream panels. “The philosophy I did here was: if it’s old, let it be old,” Mike says. “If it’s new, let it be hyper new so that the contrast is easy to see.”
The juxtaposition is very cool, with a clean line dividing the 1880s from the 2020s, while somehow the buildings marry up perfectly and create a sight that is completely unique in Christchurch.
The former theatre building is Mike’s ‘phase two’, which he hopes to have renovated, up and running by the end of the year. It’s hard to imagine, looking that the dusty and dark interior, but Mike insists everything is on track after a couple of years of Covid-related delays.
The structure is sound, he says, as it was one of the only buildings in the world at the time built with steel reinforcing in the brickwork. The walls are six bricks thick, and the whole thing is supported by eight-metre solid kauri and shorter ironwood piles. All there is left to do, Mike says, is clean it all up, do some remedial works, and add floors, dividing walls, plumbing, electrical, balconies, and fitouts. So just a small job, then.
Mike’s vision is big, big enough to fill the behemoth building with life. Half of it will be an events space, modelled after Mike’s favourite San Diego jazz clubs. There’ll be a modular stage and ground-floor seats and tables that can be packed away to make standing room for concerts. On the upper floors there will be mezzanine seating and booths. “You’re going to be standing on the stage and looking up and every booth is going to be a different colour,” Mike says. “It’s going to be a little bit of Vegas in here.”
It won’t be restricted to theatre, either. Mike’s opening up the stage to any kind of entertainment: comedy, gigs, TED talks, DJ dance club pop-ups, or anything else cool that comes along. “There are so many people in Christchurch that have all these ideas. They’re so creative. I just want to make sure that I don’t pigeonhole it too much.”
The other half of the building is into three levels. The ground floor will be a dining hall with seven small concept restaurants, kind of like stationary food trucks. Visitors can order directly from the restaurants, Little High-style, or they can grab a table, order through an app, and wait for the food to turn up.
Next up is a floor with nine apartments and an office space, with a deck that extends over the old railway line looking out on Hagley Park. This level has a four-metre stud, and creative tenants are welcome to install mezzanines or find other ways to capitalise on the height.
On the top floor, Mike is opening up the attic space to build eight two-storey ultra-modern apartments, each with a bi-fold door and its own balcony with a view. The apartments will be smart homes, with electronics controlled by iPads that come with the property.
The key is flexibility. Mike says he’s providing the framework, but whoever buys or rents a space can bring him ideas for how they want it set up, whether it’s moving a wall in an apartment, installing special lighting for a show, or setting up smart technology in a restaurant.
“I’m an engineer. If you give me a problem, I’m gonna want to fix it… Let’s have some fun.”
Timeline: The Mill
1890 – William Derisley Wood decides to build the Wood Brothers' Addington Mill.
1891 – The steam-powered mill begins operating.
1908 – Architect J.C. Maddison completes an extension of the complex.
1913 – Large brick grain silo completed.
1916 – Mill converted to electric power.
1924 – The mill closes for a year while the complex is extended by Architects S. and A. Luttrell. Gardens and bowling green added to the grounds.
1949 – Large fire damages the mill, but it is up and running again in a fortnight.
1970 – The Wood family sells the complex to the Wattie Group. IT is leased for small businesses such as a gymnasium, a bakery, and an exhibition space.
1982 – Plans are approved for a theatre, restaurant and apartments in the complex.
1983 – The Riccarton Players community theatre group buy the building and make The Mill Theatre their home.
2011 – Buildings damaged in the February 22 earthquake.
2016 – The Riccarton Players sell the complex to Mike King, who begins restoring and developing it for commercial, residential and entertainment use.
woodsmill.co.nz
Meet the millers
Millworks
This co-working space upstairs is the sister to the Salt District’s Saltworks. Probably the best views of any co-working space in Christchurch. It’s dog-friendly and you’re pretty much guaranteed to find cool k9s here any day of the week. Millworks is also a collaborative and creative space, buzzing with a mixture of small businesses with permanent setups, flexible workers, and hot desks for drop-in freelancers and entrepreneurs. An awesome place to find inspiration and meet amazing people doing incredible things, all in The Mill’s red brick chic surrounds.
Millworks was set up by Christchurch businessman Leon Mooney, and he’s very hands-on when it comes to working alongside the businesses that occupy the space, and helping promote them. Leon’s been a Salt District advocate for a long time, and is super supportive of Addington’s growth and development as a new hub of innovative enterprise.
works.nz
SOLE Music Academy
This academy opened its doors on the ground floor of The Mill in early 2020, championed by music industry aficionado Sacha Vee. SOLE Music Academy trains students in singing, songwriting and producing, with a view to writing recordable songs, making real records and putting on shows. It also teaches students about the business side of the industry, helping them define a vision, image, brand, and target market, and even teaming students up with the right producers to get them ahead of the game. Society may view music as a hobby, but SOLE is helping passionate people rise above that and make it into their career. Sacha sees each of her students as an entrepreneur setting out to create something unique and make a profession of it. The academy is all about real people, and The Mill is the perfect gritty surround to hold regular talks by artists like Tiki Taane, Mousey, and Emma Dilemma.
Sacha is a Christchurch girl who made it big on the European music scene performing on Dutch television show The Voice of Holland in 2011, before going on to record multiple hit singles and albums, including Poland’s 2017 Hip Hop Album of the Year, Życie Po Śmierci, in collaboration with O.S.T.R.
solemusicacademy.co.nz
