Alberton

Alberton
by Celia Walker
A wedding cake confection of tiered balconies, turrets and white painted curlicues, Alberton presents a grand and elegant face to the world. Despite the site being nibbled away by the development of the former DSIR (now Plant and Food Research) adjacent property in the 1970s, Alberton still has enough of its gently sloping lawn and gardens to evoke thoughts of garden parties and hunts, and the retention of a small working farm in the grounds of Mt Albert Grammar School
below the property carries on the visual effect of Alberton’s former 500 acre estate.

The house was built in 1863 for Alan Kerr Taylor, the son of a wealthy British Army colonel who spent much of his career in India. The ornate verandahs and bulbous corner turrets reflect these links to colonial India, and are what make the architecture of the house so distinctive. The land is part of the lower slopes of
Owairaka/Mt Albert, and was part of a large package sold to the crown by Ngati Whatua in 1841.

Any 18-room house is probably going to have some interesting nooks and crannies – here the more utilitarian spaces offer up the best glimpse of behind-the-scenes life. There are the tiny, plain attic rooms reached by a slightly perilous ascent up what is more a ladder than a staircase, something that definitely wouldn’t pass through Council planning regulations now – this is a great place for children who might find the formal rooms a little hard to relate to. The coal range and the scrubbed, worn and bleached out wooden surfaces of the kitchen conjure up thoughts of hard work but also slow-cooking and rich food traditions.

The shaded little dairy outbuilding (where butter would have been made and kept) and the washhouse with its original copper washing vessel take one step further away from the grandiosity suggested by Alberton’s façade.

If glitz and glamour is more of your thing the house has that too, with an elegant ballroom, stiff and formal study and lacy, feminine sitting room. Although these gendered spaces outwardly conform to the social norms of the time, Alan Kerr Taylor’s second wife Sophia was pushing the boundaries as best she could by getting involved in the suffragette movement.

Two elderly sisters lived on in the house into the 1960s, the last, Muriel, died in 1972 and bequeathed it to the public, changing little from its original state. The retention of original wallpapers and furnishings with all their marks of age and use, gives the house a feeling of lived-in shabby chic, and help to make it more real than just any old re-created nostalgia trip. The use as a functions venue also helps breathe fresh air into the property, as do the cultivated gardens and mature trees in the grounds.

Image Credits: Celia Walker