A fire that destroyed a storage shed behind a Kerikeri café late on Friday night came within a few metres of Kemp House, the oldest surviving building in New Zealand, at a moment when the 204-year-old house was wrapped in plastic sheeting and stripped of much of its roof.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand said it was notified of the fire at 11.30pm on Friday and five crews responded. The blaze had taken hold in a storage shed alongside the Honey House Café at Kerikeri Basin, and firefighters found it well involved when they arrived. The shed was destroyed, one wall of the café was burned, and its water pipes and electrical cabling were badly damaged. Fire and Emergency has classified the fire as suspicious and referred it to police.
What kept the fire from becoming a national heritage loss was a driver on his way to work. Kerikeri deputy fire chief Andy Hamberger told RNZ that the man spotted smoke near the basin about 11.30pm and rang 111.
“It was called in by a chap who was going to work, he spotted the fire,” Hamberger said.
“Without him the potential for spread to Kemp House was actually quite scary, to be honest, because they’ve got it surrounded with plastic sheeting to protect it. Potentially we could have had a fire in that Kemp House as well,” he said.
“I don’t know him but a big shout out to that guy, because without him being pretty vigilant on his way to work, we could be looking at a major building fire, or a heritage building being lost, or certainly significantly damaged.”
The plastic is there because Kemp House is in the middle of the biggest job it has had in decades. Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga announced on 19 August that the replacement of thousands of wooden shingles on the roof was underway, with Kerikeri firm Henwood Construction leading the work and the house covered in a white waterproof membrane while the shingles are off. Northern assets manager Boris Bogdanovich said the timbers beneath had come through two centuries in better shape than anyone expected.
“The shingles might be on their last legs, but the wooden structure underneath – including the original kauri beams that were shaped by carpenters over two centuries ago – are in incredibly good condition for their age,” Bogdanovich said when the project began.
Membrane and timber framing are exactly the wrong things to have next to a shed fire. RNZ reported that if firefighters had arrived a few minutes later the flames could have taken hold of the two-storey Honey House and spread from there to the mission house behind it.
John O’Hare, Heritage New Zealand’s Northland spokesman, said the whole Kerikeri Mission Station site was closed while police and fire investigators worked. Neither Kemp House nor the Stone Store was damaged.
“But it was too close for comfort. It was very, very close, and we’re just very thankful that that Kemp House didn’t catch alight, and incredibly disappointed that somebody would do this. The indicators are that this was a deliberate act, which is appalling,” O’Hare said.
A spokesperson for the café said the fire had been small and that “both Kemp House and Stone Store were thankfully unaffected by the blaze”. The café is likely to stay shut for some time. “Authorities are currently investigating, so the site is closed until further notice,” the spokesperson told the New Zealand Herald. Police said they were notified by Fire and Emergency shortly before 1am, posted a scene guard overnight, and had investigators at the site on Saturday.
The buildings that were nearly caught up in it are not ordinary old houses. Kemp House was put up in 1821 and 1822 by missionary carpenters and Māori sawyers for the Reverend John Butler, the only ordained minister in the settlement at the time. The Church Missionary Society had established the Kerikeri mission in 1819 under the protection of the rangatira Hongi Hika, a chief whose authority made the settlement possible, and the house survives as a physical marker of the two decades of contact between Māori and European settlers that preceded the Treaty of Waitangi. It stayed in the Kemp family until Ernest Kemp gifted it to the nation through the New Zealand Historic Places Trust in 1974.
Next door, the Stone Store was built between 1832 and 1836 as a warehouse for the mission, using local basalt and sandstone shipped from New South Wales. It is the oldest undamaged stone building in the country and holds a category 1 listing with Heritage New Zealand. Over its life it has served as a post office, a native school, a polling station and a boxing venue.
The Honey House itself is the newcomer in the group. Despite its historic look it was built in 1976 as a curator’s cottage, on the site of a historic barn, and takes its name from a shed James Kemp junior once used to store beehives nearby. The café opened in 2012, drawing some of its recipes from historic archives and using fruit from the mission station’s heritage orchard. Heritage New Zealand has offices on the floor above it, which is why a shed fire at the back of a small café is also a fire in the middle of the organisation that looks after the site.
The risk was not a surprise to the brigade. In February this year the Kerikeri Volunteer Fire Brigade ran a major exercise at Kerikeri Basin built around a scenario in which people were trapped in a burning Stone Store. In 2023 a large stand of gum trees near the same building was poisoned, leaving a risk that dead trees could fall on it.
The reroofing is meant to be finished in time for summer, and Heritage New Zealand has been asking the public for help paying for it. Bogdanovich said rising material costs had “stretched the budget for this project to the limit”. Fire damage to the café building and its services was not in that budget, and the site closure now sits on top of it.
Have you visited the Kerikeri Mission Station? Tell us what the place means to you 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 🙂
Leave a Reply