Katherine Mansfield House & Garden

Narrow casement windows run along the façade of the small house, where the domestic life of late nineteenth-century Wellington has been assembled. In eighteen eighty-eight, an employee of an import firm built it for his growing family. Three generations of relatives lived in its rooms, and probably servants as well. The future writer spent her first five years of life here; the garden is planted with species popular in her time.

In the mid-nineteen eighties, the art historian and university lecturer Oroya Day spent several years trying to persuade government agencies to purchase this house. Unsuccessfully. Then, in nineteen eighty-six, she founded an independent society, raised donations, and acquired the building a year later. Just over a year remained until Katherine Mansfield's centenary, and the house had already been converted into two apartments: separate entrances, a new kitchen, extra walls, and large bay windows had appeared. The society intended to repair it and house writers here.

The plan changed during the work itself. Beneath plywood on the staircase, the builders found balusters turned to resemble bamboo stems. Narrow strips of old wallpaper remained behind baseboards and door casings; they were found in almost every room. When the later-added bay windows were removed, it became clear that much of the original façade cladding had survived. The renovation revealed the house that had existed inside the converted apartments.

It was built in eighteen eighty-eight by Harold Beauchamp, a senior employee of an import firm, who was establishing a home here for his growing family and expected to rise in Wellington's business world. The lease required him to build a substantial house costing at least four hundred pounds. Under one roof lived the Beauchamp couple, their children, Annie Beauchamp's mother and two sisters; servants probably lived here too.

On October fourteenth of the same year, Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in the house. She later took the name Katherine Mansfield and became famous for her short stories. She became a writer far from here: only the first five years of her life were spent in this house. Three generations of the family were cramped, and in eighteen ninety-three Harold moved the household to a large suburban house in Karori.

Years later, Mansfield brought this move back in the story Prelude. There, too, the family leaves a city house, and a child remembers the emptied rooms, windows, and blinds. When the original construction drawings could not be found, the restorers compared her descriptions with archival photographs, traces beneath the floors and walls, and the results of excavations. They removed the layout of the two apartments, restored the kitchen and the former window openings, and reproduced the wallpaper patterns from the strips that had been found. The traces of later occupants were deliberately removed: the museum presents the Beauchamp family's five years, not the building's entire biography.

On October fourteenth, nineteen eighty-eight, exactly one hundred years after the writer's birth, the restored house was opened to the public. Today, the rooms are arranged as the home of a Wellington family of the late nineteenth century, and the exhibitions connect household objects with Mansfield's stories. The garden is grown as a historical garden, with plants popular during her lifetime.

The narrow casement windows on the façade were recreated by the restorers. The wallpaper inside was printed anew. The bamboo balusters on the staircase are original, and the profile of the handrail reproduces a fragment found beneath the house.