Rick Herd says the business has a good relationship with the Anglican church in Christchurch. Photo / Michael Craig
From building Christchurch's modern cardboard cathedral to restoring the historic Christ Church Cathedral, they're both tasks for the same builder.
Rick Herd, chief executive of national business Naylor Love, says that in something of a bookend move, the company won both jobs.
Its task now is to deliver the $154 million project to strengthen, restore and enhance the old cathedral, which dates back more than 150 years. "It's a challenging project," Herd says of the Warren and Mahoney-designed changes to the cathedral which include building new foundations, underpinning the whole structure and base isolation to protect it from future earthquakes.
"The cathedral is a highly compromised fragile stone masonry structure with a heavy timber frame and a slate roof," he says. "It needs support and bracing before the foundations can be excavated. The overall project will take six to seven years. We've been there a little over a year."
As for that stylish cardboard cathedral: "It'll last at least 50 years. It had to meet Building Code and the cardboard is just aesthetics. The actual structure is laminated veneer lumber."
So, not much temporary about the strength of that building.
"Naylor Love is the biggest New Zealand-owned private national builder," he says. "We'll have annual revenue in the year to June 30, 2021, of around $720m to $750m. We're in the top three," he says, ranking the biggest builders as Fletcher Construction, then Hawkins [now owned by ASX-listed Downer], and then Naylor Love.
"But we are not about being the biggest, but the best, with most of our work being negotiated with long-term clients."
Herd "lives in Nelson, has a desk in Christchurch" but spends much of his time travelling for work.
An engineer, he started with the Ministry of Works in 1973 and did his certificate of civil engineering. His last job for the ministry was contract supervision and administration for Wellington's Ngauranga Gorge Interchange. At the end of that project in 1983, the main contractor, Mainzeal Construction, offered him a job.
"I began as a site co-ordinator and worked my up to the role of South Island construction manager In the mid-1990s."
Thee Kirkcaldie and Staines redevelopments including two office towers, and the Pole 2 converter station at the Benmore dam are among the jobs he worked on.
He has been married to Sue for 38 years, and the couple have a daughter working in construction law in London and a son with a supply chain business in Auckland.
"The construction industry puts huge demands on families with long hours and in my case changing locations as a result of the 1987 sharemarket crash," says Herd. "My daughter attended 10 different primary schools.
"I chose to give my family stability and got an MBA in 1996 which opened the door to my first opportunity as a chief executive of N&B Group in Nelson, multi-disciplined marine engineers servicing and refitting the large fleet of ocean-going factory trawlers. I really loved this experience.
"Then I took a role as general manager LVL at Nelson Pine Industries and directed the construction of their world-scale veneer and laminated veneer lumber facilities," he says.
He was then appointed Brightwater Engineers' chief executive, "and I grew that business from about $15 million annual revenue to $150m."
From there he moved on to head Naylor Love, "a company that I had worked with and competed against in my time at Mainzeal. I held enormous respect for it and my expectation of the values of the company and quality of their people has not been disappointed. Naylor Love has tripled in scale, capacity and capability."
The builder now operates in eight centres from six regional offices.
Fletcher and Hawkins have foreign shareholders, putting Naylor Love in a unique position with its private family control, which includes descendants of the people who founded the company more than a century ago. Today, the builder is owned by interests of the Naylor, Kempton, Watson, McPherson, Harding, Clayton, Boland and Dickinson families.
Naylor Love began as two independent building companies in Dunedin in 1910: WH Naylor and Love Brothers Construction. In 1969 the two merged to form what is today's enterprise. Builder Chris Naylor, a grandson of founder Hugh Naylor, serves on the company's board.
Herd has been chief executive for eight years, and estimates that the business has expanded by at least 10 per cent per year over that period.
"You don't take all the jobs until you have the people to build them and understand the technical reasons," he says of the builder's approach to winning work.
Naylor Love represents the vertical construction industry on the Government's Construction Sector Accord, a shared commitment to post-Covid recovery which aims to boost the industry's productivity.
It is also a premium partner of suicide-prevention campaign Mates in Construction NZ, and sponsors the Property Council's heritage and adaptive reuses award.
Herd says Sylvia Park in Mt Wellington has been a major focus: the company was the head contractor on the most recent $258m expansion, building the new 50-shop Galleria, as well as a new parking building. Naylor Love also won Kiwi Property's tender for a new apartment/hotel/retail block at Sylvia Park, "but whether it goes ahead is unsure".
It is also the head contractor on the $100m conversion of the former Auckland Council Civic Administration Building [CAB] on Greys Ave/Aotea Square, which developer John Love is transforming from offices into apartments.
"It's going to take over a year to remove asbestos. We're removing asbestos from the top down and we're down to about level 12," says Herd. "It's a structural steel building but its concrete floors are not up to current building code and we're replacing those. Only part of the building remains - the structural steel skeleton."
Herd says the builder will also deliver AUT's Akoranga Campus job on Auckland's North Shore, where an engineered wood frame is planned. In fact, he sees big prospects for engineered wood products over steel in framing, as well as the potential for shrink wrap building coverings to be recyclable.
Contact Energy is considering a potential new geothermal power station on the Tauhara geothermal field near Taupō. Herd says Naylor Love is also in a preferred position on that $600m-$700m job. "We're doing about $100m of civil works," he says.
Naylor Love's more prominent projects also include: SkyCity's new atrium redevelopment; the Miles Warren building at Christ's College; various projects at The Base shopping centre near Hamilton; Te Papa's Gallipoli Exhibition; supermarkets from the North Shore to Queenstown; and Kawarau Gorge Bungy Centre.
Naylor Love also rebuilt the Isaac Theatre Royal in Christchurch after it was badly damaged by the 2011 quakes.
Auckland's Park Residences for Conrad Properties, in the CBD on the corner of Albert St and Swanson St, was one of the builder's larger apartment jobs.
Many projects have won awards, including the $7.8 m rebuild of the Devonport Library, a cedar-clad structure designed by Athfield Architects.
And Herd's got a bit of a saying about how the firm chooses its work: "We won't do every job but we can do any job we want."
Job: Chief executive, national builder Naylor Love
Age: 63
Qualifications: Civil engineer, MBA
Family: Married for 38 years to Sue, with a son and daughter
Lives: Nelson
Offices: Christchurch
Fletcher Building, Spark and Ryman are potentially all on the radar.