A Maori Hill house was built on a horse paddock, had a portion of its back wall blown off by a cannon, houses a 126-year-old piano and is for sale for the first time since its 1890s construction.
The house had been in Geoffrey Sneddon's family since it was built in a then desolate Maori Hill, Mr Sneddon said yesterday.
His grandmother and grandfather moved into the partially built villa after their wedding in the 1890s, though the exact date was not known.
Before then the land had been used as a paddock where his grandmother's horse grazed.
But after 120 years in the family, the house was now on the market, ''for personal family reasons'', Mr Sneddon told the Otago Daily Times.
He said his great-grandparents, the Penmans, used to keep horses on the site, while the family lived just down the street on the corner of Highgate and McMillan St.
But at some point in the 1890s his grandmother and grandfather, the Boramans, bought the property at 449 Highgate, after getting married.
At that time the house was ''partially completed'', Mr Sneddon said, and the couple continued working on it for a number of years.
His mother, uncles, brothers and he were born in the house, he said.
One story about the house involved a hole in a wall, a cannon, and two mischievous boys, he said.
The boys were his uncles, and the cannon was his grandmother's sister's.
A ''signalling cannon'', it was given to her by the captain of the ship Italy when she travelled as a young girl between Tasmania and Dunedin in the late 1800s, he said.
Years later, some time between 1910 and 1914, when the young girl was now mother to two boys, those boys decided to test whether the old cannon really worked.
It turned out it did, as the damaged back wall testified to, Mr Sneddon said.
The wall was repaired and there was no sign of the damage.
What was visible when the family went into the house to clean it last month was an assortment of documents Mr Sneddon's mother had kept in boxes.
The paperwork mostly consisted of letters and receipts, he said, and dated from the 1820s to the 1940s.
Toitu Otago Settlers Museum had taken some of the collection, some was still at the house and the rest was ''cluttering up'' Mr Sneddon's house, he said.
An 1889 piano made for the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition of that year was also still in place and in tune, though hosting a significant borer population.
The house had been mostly empty since about 2000, he said, when his mother moved into his family home.
A squatter had taken up residence, with permission, for a few years since then, although most of the rooms had stayed locked up.
