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“if it is compatible with us . . . We agreed to an $80,000 lease for one month all included, and that’s how it all evolved from there.”

IT IS NOT A POOR community, Coatesville. Many who live there don’t face a drawn-out morning commute into the city. They work from home, or enjoy the hours afforded those who have broken the back of a lifetime’s work. They head in when they’re ready and back out when they’ve done or had enough. Behind them they leave beautiful properties with stay-at-home spouses who oversee gardeners or cleaners to manage large, comfortable country homes on sprawling lifestyle block sections. The mansion which became home to the Dotcom family was many orders of magnitude wealthy beyond that.

It began life as the “house which Christmas built”. It was designed to fulfill the dreams of Chrisco millionaire Richard Bradley, who was raised poor on the working-class Liverpool side of affluent Cheshire in England. The Chrisco business was aimed at the same working class stock from which he came, allowing regular savings into accounts that would pay for a bumper Christmas hamper. Critics said the business enjoyed a massive profit margin on the goods it provided; Bradley liked to style himself as helping those he understood best and said he carried large overheads for the service he supplied.

It made him a fortune so great that it began searching for a purpose and found one through building the most opulent home in New Zealand. The money which went into it was extraordinary. The entire 30-hectare site needed sculpting, with olive groves planted, lawns seeded and roads created. The mansion itself is enormous — Bradley would later walk about the place, thinking of the manor houses he saw as a boy in Cheshire. Here, finally, was a home as grand as those he remembered. Here, finally, was proof he had made good. Asked about it, he said: “When you’re born in England, if you’re ambitious, then you want what the aristocracy have. You want the Roller, or the Bentley or the Aston Martin. You want the country house.”

Yes, he said, the money which went into it was crazy. “It would have been much easier to have moved back to England to buy one for probably far less than I paid to have one built.”

He took a personal interest in creating the house to fit the ambitions of the poor boy he once was. The “panic room” built into the attic space above the master bedroom was part of that, along with the secret door which disguised its location. Big country houses have secret rooms — it was a well-known fact, he said. “It is pretty easy, when you can afford

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