The Karori house where Katherine Mansfield spent what her biographers describe as the happiest years of her childhood is for sale. Chesney Wold, at 372 Karori Road in Wellington, is being marketed by Ray White, which is accepting offers until 1 October, RNZ reported on Thursday.
Salesperson Christy Kimble told RNZ the home was valued at almost $2 million, and that the current owners were looking to downsize. “Obviously, it’s a higher-end home and we’ll see what people’s appetite to spend that sort of money is,” Kimble said.
Buyers are looking at a five-bedroom, two-bathroom house with three living rooms, a horseshoe drive and a six-car carport. What they are really buying, though, is a piece of New Zealand literary history. Few private homes in the country can claim to be the setting for one of the most widely read short stories written by a New Zealander.
Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 in Thorndon, in the house on Tinakori Road that is now the Katherine Mansfield House and Garden museum. In 1893 her father, the businessman Harold Beauchamp, took the lease on Chesney Wold and moved the family out to what was then a country district on the edge of Wellington. According to the Wellington City Council heritage inventory, Mansfield spent longer at Chesney Wold than at any home she lived in afterwards. The family moved back into town in 1898.
She started school in Karori with her sisters, and Karori Normal School has honoured her with a stone monument and plaque marking her time there. Those five years in the valley stayed with her long after she left New Zealand for England at 19. The council’s heritage record notes that the house and the suburb are the setting for three of her stories, which it says has guaranteed the house a lasting fame.
The best known is The Doll’s House, the story of the Burnell children, a gift of an elaborate doll’s house, and the two Kelvey girls who are shut out from seeing it because of who their mother is. Mansfield wrote it in Switzerland in 1921, when she was already seriously ill with tuberculosis, and it was published in 1922, the year before she died in France aged 34. RNZ reported it was set at Chesney Wold, and that her story About Pat drew inspiration from the property’s groundskeeper. Her longer story Prelude, which follows a family much like her own as it moves house to the country, also draws on the move to Karori.
The house was not new when the Beauchamps arrived. It was built in 1866 by Stephen Lancaster, a farmer, landowner and builder who later became the first mayor of Karori. The council’s history says Lancaster rarely lived in the house himself, starting a long pattern of tenants coming and going. Among the earliest were James Fitzgerald, a former superintendent of Canterbury province, and from 1872 Carey and Ann Brown. Ann Brown ran a private school at Chesney Wold for two years after her husband’s death in 1875.
The building a buyer gets today looks little like the one Mansfield knew. In 1901, a few years after the Beauchamps left, the verandah was enclosed, the twin gables were removed and the house was turned into an Italianate mansion. It kept growing in stages for the next half century. Then in 1969 it was converted into four flats and, in the council’s words, reduced to a square box. The original main entrance faced north, while the front door now opens onto the street side.
By the 1970s people interested in Mansfield’s legacy had become worried about what was happening to the house, and a partial restoration followed in the mid 1980s. The large garden and orchard that once surrounded it have long since been subdivided for housing. The council’s assessment is frank that careful examination would be needed to work out what, if any, original fabric from 1866 survives, but it rates the house as historically important for its age, its association with Lancaster and the Beauchamps, and the high public esteem it holds because of Mansfield’s writing.
Kimble told RNZ the heritage home had been renovated many times over its century and a half, going from a 5.7 hectare rural mansion to flats at one point. “Now it’s been just really well restored and maintained, as it’s a really nice family home,” Kimble said.
Some period features remain, including sash windows and textured plaster mouldings of the kind made popular by the Carrara Ceiling Company in the 1920s. “It’s like art being built into the walls, via the plaster. It’s so beautiful,” Kimble said.
The house sits back from Karori Road behind a brick-lined driveway, trees and lawn, and is mostly hidden from the street. That has helped it stay a private family home rather than a stop on the tourist trail, even as Mansfield’s reputation has grown. She is now regarded as one of the great modernist short story writers in English, and the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship still sends New Zealand writers to work at her former villa in the south of France.
Unlike her Thorndon birthplace, which is run as a museum, Chesney Wold has always been lived in, and there is no suggestion the sale will change that. Whoever buys it will own a house that turns up in one of the country’s most studied stories, and one that has come back from being carved into flats. Wellington’s older suburbs have lost plenty of 19th-century houses to subdivision and rebuilding, so a Karori home from 1866 with a literary pedigree changing hands is worth noting in its own right.
Offers close on 1 October.
Did you read The Doll’s House at school, or have you visited Mansfield’s Wellington? Should a house with this much history stay a private home, or be opened up to the public? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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