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It seems unlikely that any home in Warkworth has had such a chequered history as Riverina, built more than 100 years ago by Nathaniel and Florence Wilson. Starting as a grand home fit for the owner of one of New Zealand’s most successful cement enterprise, the two-storey villa on the corner of Wilson and Hepburn Creek Roads has served an extraordinary range of occupants and uses since then. Under the care of its current owner, Beverley Simmons, Riverina is now a NZHPT Category 2 Historic Place restored with a commitment to preserve a significant part of WWs heritage.
In 1901 The Auckland Weekly News reported, “Mr Wilson of the Cement Works is about to build a concrete house on the hill”. This was to be Wilson’s third home on the same block of land and was built of fired clay, not of the cement that was the source of his affluence. The architect was Robert Wladislas de Montalk, FNZIA, at that time prominent in Auckland as the designer for the 1898-99 Auckland Mining and Industrial Exhibition, held on the site now occupied by the Princes Street campus of the University of Auckland. It is possible de Montalk also designed the mirror-image flats, Little Riverina, opposite the grand house, and he designed the former works manager’s house – now known as Wilson House – in lower Wilson Road. After the successful outcome of these commissions it is believed he took on similar briefs designing concrete houses in the Auckland suburban areas.
The clay for Riverina was dug from the paddock opposite the front of the house, across Wilson Road, and was burnt in a continuous process on a fire of puriri logs brought to the site by bullock wagon. It was then mixed with lime and rammed between a form-work, the exterior walls being 230mm (9 inches) thick and the interior 180mm (7 inches). Wire hausers were tightened around the house at three levels and steel mesh was used to strengthen intermediate internal walls. The exterior walls were cement plastered and scribed to resemble stonework. The interior walls were plastered. The roof was corrugated iron with an ornamental ventilator. The lower entrance verandah (removed and replicated in 1988) was concrete.
Kauri timber for flooring, joinery and lathes was supplied by the Leyland O’Brien Timber Co. of Auckland and transported by steamer up the Mahurangi River to the Cement Works. An Italian craftsman from Sydney made the plaster ceilings, cornices and ceiling roses on site, and the skills of tradesmen employed at the Cement Works were used in the general construction of the house. The staircase, the subject of some dispute between client and architect, was made in Auckland. It was designed with an easy gradient for Nathaniel and Florence’s son, Nathaniel Jnr, who had a heart defect.
The established planting by the entrance gate – pohutukawa, puriri, rimu, kauri and totara – dates from the time the house was built, but the two Norfolk pines west of the house are over 120 years old and relate to the second house built on the site.
Nathaniel Wilson died in 1919 aged 83; his wife Florence had predeceased him six years earlier. The property passed out of Wilson ownership, via his grandchildren, in 1938 and by then the original land holding had been reduced to 1ha (2.5 acres).
For the next 30 years it had a succession of owners or occupiers and uses. In the 1940s Riverina served as the HQ for more than 20 US military camps and training sites scattered from Pakiri Beach to Tapora. Some of the soldiers were here to train for forthcoming battles on Pacific islands, others had returned from the war and were here to recover their health; and there were some whose job was to provide supplies. In the 1950s, the grand old house was used as workers’ accommodation for road construction gangs working for Bitumix Ltd. Last year descendants of one of those workers, Keith Baker, donated a park bench to Parry Kauri Park in his memory. Keith and his wife, Pat, as newlyweds lived in Riverina while he managed the upgrade of the road from Dairy Flat to Wellsford in 1955.
In the 1960s the property was used briefly as a hostel for P&T workers. It was later used as a drainlayer’s dump and fell into disrepair. Dorothy Trethowen and her husband bought it with the intention of restoring it, but he died suddenly and she decided to put the property on the market.
Beverley Simmons says when she and her husband Ron saw the house for the first time on January 2, 1969, it was derelict and full of rubbish, including a dead sheep in the front room. They had always wanted an old house so when they heard about a historic house for sale in Warkworth, they drove north for a look and managed to get in through a window. Undaunted by the sheep’s carcass, they went to see real estate agent Bill Postlewaight and signed up for settlement early in March.
“We took out seven truckloads of rubbish including old engines and a dinghy,” Beverley says. “By Easter the house was more or less cleared of detritus, and then the work really started.”
The couple bought Riverina as a project and a holiday home, and after having the major restoration work completed, they spent their weekends there painting, hanging wallpaper and restoring some of the abandoned furniture that was in the house when they bought it. They contracted Ron Moore – brother of pioneer botanist the late Lucy Moore – to do the initial carpentry work, a job that inspired for him some romantic memories. When he was courting his wife, Winnie McGregor, she was a teacher boarding at Riverina and Ron would throw gravel at her upstairs window to get her attention. With an engineer supervising, an Auckland construction company replaced the foundations and other major work was done progressively over the next few years, including new roof, ground-floor verandah and floor of the upstairs verandah, waterproofed the exterior walls and threaded steel rods through the walls to strengthen the structure. The rods are tied to exterior steel plates that, for want of a pattern to guide the design, were based on the pattern on a breadboard. In the 1970s Ron and Beverley bought 20 adjoining acres, restoring the property to something approximating its original size. The driveway was later rerouted, ancillary buildings, entrance gates and fences were built and landscaping and tree planting was initiated. The house has a 13ft (4m) stud and six fireplaces, including a replacement for one that was missing. Originally a five-bedroom home, it now has three bedrooms; the others have been converted into a library and a second bathroom, bringing the house “more or less into the 20th century upstairs”, Beverley says. She made the house her permanent home in 1987, four years after Ron died. Don and Wendy Milne had been renting the property and loved it almost as much as the owner did.
“I don’t regret buying this, although it cost us an arm and a leg,” Beverley says. “It became a creative exercise for both of us, and the old house still wraps her arms around me when I come home.”
As the restoration progressed, Beverley became interested in the history of the place, and she has been delighted with the thoughtfulness of locals who have contributed or returned significant items to the house over the years. The late Max Hamilton, who was Nathaniel Wilson’s grandson and spent his childhood holidays at Riverina, gave the Simmons a foot scrape and umbrella stand. Lucy Moore brought Beverley a little plate that had held scones baked for her ill mother by Mrs Wilson, and several people have donated photographs depicting various stages of the villa’s unusual story.
