Photographer moves into iconic childhood dream house

As a child riding in the car with her parents, Tracey Scott would drive past this iconic Rotorua house, admiring the two-storey colonial villa built by timber magnate Sir Charles Kusabs.

“I would say to my dad, there's my house. I always loved it, ever since the day I clapped eyes on it,” the prizewinning photographer and passionate collector told RNZ's Culture 101.

Kusabs, she said, started construction of the historic Whakarewarewa house “in about 1897 (and) finished it in 1906. It took a long time”.

Te Hemo as it is named, is a Category 2 heritage-listed New Zealand building and an iconic part of Rotorua's history.

Scott bought 354 square-meter Te Hemo three years’ ago – a fitting historical home for her collection of New Zealand colonial furniture, art, artifacts and books.

With stained glass and pressed ceilings shipped all the way from England, Te Hemo has been painstakingly restored and today has five bedrooms, four bathrooms, several living areas, a conservatory and a turret. It maintains its colonial architecture and distinctive white and green paintwork.

Scott's research translates Te Hemo from te reo Māori as “the end”, according to a recent feature in NZ House and Garden. She puts this down to the house being located at what was once the end of town, but jokes that it can also mean smelly, which fits with the distinctive fumes of the famous Pōhutu Geyser next door.

The building is right next door to Whakarewarewa geothermal village, with Pōhutu Geyser just across the fence.

While the previous owners undertook extensive renovations to bulk of the house, Scott has continued the work, including bringing the turret back to its former glory.

It’s every child’s dream to live in a house with a turret, she says.

“That's what fascinated me about the house. It had this kind of mystique. It's got a turret. What's in the turret? What's up there? Why do you have one of those?”

Scott, a graduate of the Otago School of Fine Arts before training in photography, says her love of collecting started young.

“When I was 10 years old, my mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I said I'd seen a little painting in an antique shop I wanted, and she thought I was quite strange. What child wants an old painting? Don't you want a toy?

“… I still have some of those pieces.”

She’s also loved old homes since she was a child, she says, growing up in one and creating memories in grandmother’s house.

“There was either fruitcake or shortbread or ginger kisses, and always some beautiful china, and then she would let me sit on the lounge floor in the formal living room, and she would pull out a big suitcase, and it was full of wind-up toys that she had collected from cruises around the world, and they were the most fabulous things,” she recalls.

“Dancing white horses and donkeys from Mexico and cats, gorgeous toys, elephants with monkeys on their back. So my grandmother's house was a happy place.”

Owning Te Hemo, which has served time as a restaurant, a convalescence hospital in World War I and was once split into four apartments, comes with “shared ownership”, she says.

People knock on the door asking to look around, often they have some connection to the place.

“I've had a lady knock on the door one day and say that she was from Australia and that her father used to live here, and could she come and have a look.

“... The great-grandson of the guy who built it, and he brought his son out from Australia and I said, do you want to come and view it?

“And he actually ended up donating me the, I didn't know he'd been a carpenter, he donated me kauri balustrades for the attic. I was rapt.”