Broadgreen Historic House

Visit the interior display in this Victorian house to see how the lifestyle of a well-off Englishman and his family was transferred to New Zealand. The fully furnished cob house, dating from about 1855, is thoroughly worth a visit. Broadgreen, originally the home of Edmund Buxton and his family, is unusually large (11 rooms) for a building made of cob and has a grand appearance.

Buxton chose to build in cob, a mixture of earth and straw and a surprising choice of material for a wealthy merchant’s house - though the exterior was marked to resemble stone. The house was well-built with a Welsh slate roof, timber floors and interior lathe and plaster walls. Unlike many small cob cottages of the same era, it survives today as an excellent example of cob construction. Visitors can step back one hundred and fifty years when they visit Broadgreen House. It’s furnished as it would have been at the time of the Buxtons, complete with fully equipped kitchen and scullery, dining room and drawing room, bedrooms, nursery and servants quarters. many with original wallpapers, which are furnished and decorated to reflect a family home of its period. The servants’ domain of kitchen, scullery and dairy have interesting exhibits, and among other fine collections on display are 19th Century clothes and antique quilts - one dating back to 1776.

The grounds were originally a one hundred acre property, used variously for farming, orchards and gardens. Like Thomas Marsden, Edmund Buxton planted many exotic trees, a practise continued by successive owners. A number of these early trees remain around Broadgreen House. Now on a much smaller property, the house is set in extensive lawns and surrounded by the Samuels Rose Gardens, which contain around three thousand plants of some six hundred rose varieties.