‘Fire and decay’ swept away most of N.Z. stately homes

Press, 7 April 1979, Page 15

‘Fire and decay’ swept away most of N.Z. stately homes

By

GARRY ARTHUR

“Demolition and fire stand defiantly as the two great destroyers of the large New Zealand house,” says Terence Hodgson in his book “Fire and Decay” about the destruction of more than 70 of the great houses built by New Zealand’s more successful settlers!

No house fitted that description more exactly than “Ready Money” Robinson’s Mansion House on the Cheviot Hills Estate. If one fate had not befallen it, the other would have. The Mansion House was empty and being readied for demolition in 1936 when it suddenly and mysteriously burned to the ground. The huge building, expanded as a patriarchal home for Robinson’s growing family, was arguably New Zealand’s most important large house. Hodgson says he has strenuously avoided the term “mansion” in the text of his book (published by Aiister Taylor), because it refers to a size of house many times larger than those built in New Zealand. “Mansion” also reflects, he says, a style of

wealthy ostentation which was actually repugnant to the early prosperous New Zealander. But he could not avoid the word in describing Cheviot’s “big house.” The Mansion House it was called, and a mansion it was intended to be. Douglas Cresswell says in his “Story of Cheviot” that Robinson set up an establishment reminiscent of an English manor.

If it had survived both fire and the demolition hammer, it would be a

real Canterbury showplace today. It was started in 1868 with a large baronial hall, dining room, library, billiard room, ballroom, drawing room, conservatory, and many upstairs bedrooms. Further extensions in 1888 completed the impressive two-storey mansion, which was built around a courtyard. It had more than 300 windows, and there were marble fireplaces in most of the rooms.

A visiting architect described the house as “a

veritable kauri forest.” The timber had arrived by schooner al Gore Bay, some of it from Akaroa.

Photographs show the rooms furnished in the cluttered Victorian style, A visitor, who saw the place not long before the fire, walked through French doors from the dining room to the conservatory, where she found "ripening grapes hung amidst bouganivillaea whose delicate scent mingled with that of mimosa, pines, lindens, and magnolias.”

An acre of flowers spread before the house, and around it were an Upper Park and Lower Park, with pine and oak walks. A gamekeeper was employed to look after the quail, skylarks, and deer. “Ready Money” Robinson erected a belfry to warn of fire, but by 1936 he had long gone, and with him the village of workers’ families living in the shadow of the Mansion House. He died only 18 months after the house was completed. After a large clear-

ing sale in 1893, the house became the property of his eldest daughter. She died in 1932. The Mansion House and Glenmark at Waipara — also destroyed by fire —are the two notable Canterbury homes which have disappeared, in Terence Hodgson’s view. But. his book describes and illustrates many others. There was Elmwood, built by Robert Hea‘ n Rhodes; Ham and the beautilul m.>g . atct.vu house named Avonhead next door; Merivale, built by William Sefton Moorhouse in Papanui Road; Sir John “Nabob” Wilson’s Cashmere, and the eccentric Professor Alexander Bickerton’s fascinating Wainoni in the sandhills east of Christchurch.

There were many more, all over New Zealand, but Canterbury seems to have had more than its share of grand houses which have been lost, as the book's title says, to “Fire and Decay.”

It is a book to bring tears to the eyes of those who admire the architecture of our pioneering past.