After determining it lacked funds to upgrade, Bluff Oyster Festival Trust has applied for resource consent to demolish the Club Hotel in Bluff.
The property is listed by Heritage New Zealand as a category 2 historic place. The Trust bought the building in 2014 and has since made multiple efforts to sell the hotel.
To make the building up to modern building standards would cost over $1 million, an unaffordable price for the Trust.
A hearing will be held on April 17 at the Invercargill City Council to decide the property’s fate.
The first hotel on the site was built in the 1860s and used as a waterfront guesthouse. A decade later it was converted into a hotel, named the Railway Hotel.
However, in 1880 in burnt down and replaced by the Terminus Hotel which was also badly damaged by a fire in 1898. Five years later, another fire tormented the building, and parts of the building had to be demolished.
The hotel was again rebuilt, before being burnt to the ground once and for all in 1914.
Later that year, the hotel was built in an Italianate style by architect Frederick Annison and has survived ever since.
