This Dunedin mansion might have seen better days, but many of the original features are intact. Kim Dungey reports.
Marguerite McKellar wanders through the grand Dunedin mansion, pausing to point out the drawing room under the turret and the buzzer in the dining room, which the original owners pushed to summon a maid.
When her late husband, Peter, brought her here in 1969, having inherited the house from his mother, no-one had lived on the first floor for many years. The rooms were in a ‘‘terrible state'' and the former billiard room was full of unwanted furniture, she says.
The couple moved into the upstairs rooms and renovated those. Now the property requires work again.
‘‘The whole house needs doing by somebody the age I was then,'' she says. ‘‘Somebody with vigour and lots of ideas.''
The partial conversion of the house to flats, even before Mrs McKellar moved in, and years recently spent in Yorkshire mean maintenance has been deferred.
Despite this, the once-stately home with its beautifully moulded plaster ceilings, rimu floors and floral curtains has an air of faded grandeur.
Stained-glass sidelights flank the front door. The corner turret has a slate roof and curved windowpanes, unusual at the time the house was built in the late 1890s. On the ground floor, a curved glass door leads to a veranda with elegant cast-iron balustrades. Upstairs, a large octagonal skylight illuminates the spacious hallway and an archway painted to look like marble leads to two of the seven bedrooms.
In the former billiard room (which was later used as a library), black-and-white photos and back issues of Country Life sit alongside the piano, and large windows provide views of a 1012sq m section that is only a stone's throw from Dunedin's CBD.
Mrs McKellar's father-in-law, Thomas McKellar, was about 30 and recently returned from medical studies in Edinburgh when he had the house built in 1896.
Three of the ground-floor rooms served as his waiting room, nurse's office and GP's surgery but a cubicle containing a sink is one of the few remaining signs of this.
Mrs McKellar smiles as she looks at the gas water heater and the pink glass in the window behind: ‘‘How did it survive with students living here? It's a miracle.''
Peter McKellar, the son of Thomas and his wife May, spoke of planting kowhai seedlings on the section with his father and riding horses on the family's Northern Southland sheep station in the school holidays. His grandfather, also Peter, was one of the first Pakeha settlers on the Waimea Plains and his great-uncle David McKellar, was a 19th-century explorer reputed to have been the first white man to reach the tip of Lake Wakatipu.
At one stage, his parents employed a cook and a nanny, both of whom would have used the steep, narrow staircase at the back of the house.
Former Otago Daily Times journalist Lois Galer, who in 1991 described the home as being desperately in need of some TLC and cash, believed the back upstairs portion probably began as a servants' wing.
The lower part of the main staircase was realigned when the ground floor was partitioned into flats. And, in the 1930s, the area above the front entrance was closed in to enlarge the room behind, an alteration Mrs McKellar would have preferred did not happen.
Nevertheless, when she first saw the house as a young bride in the 1960s, she thought it was ‘‘fantastic''.
‘‘I loved it because I love history. And I'd never seen features like this before, for instance the cupola which throws light into the upper hall.''
New owner Geoff Egerton describes the residence as structurally sound and a ‘‘lovely iconic Dunedin house'' but says restoring the property and returning it to a single dwelling will take at least a year.
Mr Egerton, who plans to rent out the property, hopes to return the bottom portion of the staircase to its original position, restore some fireplaces and reinstate the sash window where the middle bay window was added upstairs. He also owns 6 Pitt St, another former doctor's residence which was built in about 1910.
For Mrs McKellar, the sale came at the right moment - ‘‘I'm just too old to cope with it. I've been here a long time'' - but not before she was reminded of the interest that the turret house generates.
On her most recent visit, she went outside to find a man who had flatted there as a student and who remembered the fun he had had.
The house has hosted many gatherings over the years.‘‘Lots of people were welcomed here and lots of people from the university came to different parties.''
4 Pitt St, Dunedin
• Built in 1896 for GP Dr Thomas McKellar to live and practise in; then the family home of Professor Peter McKellar, who held the chair of psychology at the University of Otago from 1969 until 1985.
• It was sold recently after being in the McKellar family for 120 years.
• The 18-room mansion has a slate roof, brick walls with Oamaru stone facings and a category 2 Heritage New Zealand listing.
• It was built by J.C. White and designed by John Arthur Burnside, one of the first New Zealand-born and trained professional architects. Burnside's buildings include Transit House, the Otago Early Settlers Museum and Philips Hotel (later the Gresham Hotel).
• Pitt St's long association with the medical profession began about 1849 when Dr William Purdie bought a house near the bottom of the street which had been built for, but rejected by, the leader of the Otago settlement scheme, Captain William Cargill. From the 1880s, several doctors chose the street for their substantial homes and surgeries, some of which are now student flats. Thomas McKellar's surgery was used until 1980, with Dr Oliver Chapman and Dr William Brown among the last tenants.
- Source: Heritage New Zealand, Dunedin City Council archives, historian Paul Aubin and Marguerite McKellar
