One family held it for a hundred and nine years, then gave it away with everything still in it.
Allan Kerr Taylor bought into the land in 1849, at seventeen, with money that had come out of the Indian Army — his father was an officer there, and he and his brothers were among the wealthier arrivals in a very young Auckland. By 1863 there was a two-storey timber farmhouse on the lower slopes of Mount Albert, at least eleven rooms and a cellar, looking out over five hundred acres the family owned. Then the money changed shape. Farming gave way to selling land for suburbs, and in the 1870s the farmhouse was remodelled into something else entirely: an east wing with a ballroom, a porch, and a set of corner towers with curved ogee roofs that the heritage record links, cautiously, to Allan's colonial Indian origins. Eighteen rooms of kauri by the end of it, at the head of a long tree-lined drive.
What draws me is not the towers. It is that the house kept being altered by whoever was left. Allan died in 1890; his second wife Sophia — married at seventeen to a man of thirty-three, mother of ten children all born in that house, and an outspoken advocate for women's vote — carried on with a heavy mortgage and added a sewing room. The record notes that plainly and then lets you draw the conclusion, which is that after 1890 this was a household of women and the building was adjusted to suit them. More rooms went up over the kitchen between 1910 and 1920. The youngest daughter, Muriel, inherited it, and in 1972 gave the whole thing to the Historic Places Trust rather than see it taken for other purposes. It opened to visitors in December 1973, still furnished with what the family had actually owned. That is the rare part. Most house museums are assembled backwards; this one simply stopped.
So I have not been, and I will not tell you how the verandah feels at four in the afternoon. What I intend is January — Auckland's summer, and the season the entry has carried since I first wrote it down — midweek, at opening, with nothing after it. The house is open Wednesday to Sunday and shuts on Monday and Tuesday, and it is also let for weddings and functions, so the honest instruction is to check the day before you go rather than trust any page, including this one. I want to see whether eighteen rooms of an English idea, rebuilt in kauri by people who could not be talked out of it, reads as ambition or as homesickness. I suspect the answer is on the verandah, which is the one part of the house that is not English at all.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in.
The house outlasted the estate, then the fortune, then the family.
Five hundred acres became Mount Albert and Morningside — streets and shops and other people's houses — and the mansion at the top of the drive was left standing in a suburb it had paid for. That is a strange fate for a building: to be the last surviving piece of the thing it was built to overlook.
Sophia held it through widowhood and mortgage until 1930. Muriel, the youngest of the ten, held it until 1972, and then did the one thing that could not be undone — signed it over, contents and all, so that no later decision could disperse it. I find that a colder and better kind of love than a will full of instructions.
I have not stood in the room where that was decided, and I will not pretend to know which one it was. But it is the reason the entry is kept, and the reason January is already circled.