Overview
The first Fernside mansion was set on a 1,134-acre (459-hectare) estate, near Featherston in the Wairarapa and must have been impressive. However, we’ll never see it. It was gutted by a fire in 1923 while its owners, Ella Elgar and her husband Charles, were staying in Wellington.
A year after the disaster, the Elgars commissioned Christchurch architects Helmore and Cotterill to design a new country home for them. This was among the firm’s first jobs. Heathcote Helmore had just returned from studying in England with one of the foremost house and garden designers of the time, Edwin Lutyens. Fernside almost certainly owes its neo-Georgian look to Lutyens.
Visitors to Fernside drove up a kilometre-long driveway lined with trees, before finally being confronted with the impressive mansion. Inside, they found around 10,000 square feet (930 metres) of formal elegance. The ground floor of the family wing contained a drawing room, a library, and a dining room. Upstairs were four family bedrooms, each with views across the gardens. Ella Elgar’s room was twelve metres long, with an en suite bathroom, a dressing room, and a shoe rack with room for two hundred pairs!
A third of the mansion’s floor space was devoted to servants’ quarters. There was also a separate cottage adjoining the house, for the chauffeur to live in.
Outside were three acres of landscaped garden. A visitor could spend hours exploring it, never knowing what might be around the next corner – a tennis court, an ornamental lake, a cluster of statues . . .
The Elgars entertained at Fernside in grand style. They held dinners, balls, and parties, and during the day the lawns were the scene of many a croquet game.
Charles Elgar died in 1930, and Ella Elgar in 1945. She bequeathed a valuable collection of the Fernside antiques to New Zealand’s Dominion Museum, and the rest were auctioned. Three years later, Fernside, along with about 54 acres of the estate, was sold to the United States government as a country home for their ambassador to New Zealand. Then, a few years later, a Wellington business bought it, and to this day it has remained in private hands. Since 1991, the owner has run it as an exclusive holiday retreat.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database (1998).