Character home rebuild · Richmond · Registered Master Builders National Craftsmanship Award | Cornices moulded by hand, the original staircase remade, leadlight set into triple glazing — craftsmanship of a kind rarely asked for now. A 1913 Edwardian home on the banks of Dudley Stream, lost to the earthquakes and made again exactly — from the street, the house it always was. Read Martin’s story below.
A 1913 home, built back exactly as it was
The Edwardian house on the banks of Dudley Stream was built in 1913 by Benjamin Oakes Moore for his family, and held over the years with the kind of attachment a character home earns slowly. When the February 2011 earthquake damaged it beyond economic repair, the obvious path was to accept the loss and start fresh. Martin chose the harder one: to bring the house back, not as something like it, but as the house itself.
“I wanted things back to the pre-earthquake reality,” he says. It would take patience — years of it — and an uncommon insistence on getting every last detail right. “No corners were cut. It wasn’t about the budget. It was about being as authentic as we possibly could.”
Recording a house before letting it go
The earthquake had wrecked the house, but it still stood — and that gave us a narrow, vital window. Before anything was demolished, our team recorded it in fine detail: hundreds of photographs, measurements and sketches of every cornice, mullion and odd-angled wall.
Some pieces could be saved outright. The stained glass and leadlight windows were carefully removed, as was the much-loved skylight above the stairs. Others — stone mullions, plaster cornices — were lifted out to serve as templates, moulds taken so their exact profiles could be cast again. Working backwards from that record, we drew up construction drawings for a complete, ground-up rebuild of a house that, by then, existed only as a memory and a set of measurements.
The same house, exactly
What makes Julius Terrace remarkable is how little it concedes.
Every room sits where it always did, at the dimensions it always had — the kitchen out the back, the formal dining room overlooking the garden at the front, the master bedroom without the ensuite it never had. Even the rooms with slightly awkward shapes were kept faithfully awkward. Where the original walls were triple brick, the new ones were rebuilt around a steel structure behind a facade of brick, Oamaru stone and plaster: modern where it counts, indistinguishable where it shows.
“Not many would rebuild a 100-year-old home like this,” says CCA director Stephen Crooks. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime project.”
Craft, recovered
The detail is where a replica lives or dies, and this is where the project asked the most.
Edwardian cornice profiles were re-cast from moulds of the originals. The generous original staircase was manufactured anew. The bench seats tucked into the windows were rebuilt by hand, and the ceiling decorations studied and matched until they read exactly as they always had. The marble fireplace was repaired so carefully that its earthquake cracks now pass for veins in the stone. Above the stairs, the recovered skylight again draws daylight down into a space that has always, by design, been dark.
For builder Steve Brown, all of it came down to the people on the tools. “We had to go back to craftsmanship, and that’s down to the boys on site,” he says. “All of the sub-trades brought pride to this site.”
Old glass, modern comfort
A faithful replica doesn’t have to be a cold one — and this is where heritage quietly meets present-day performance.
The salvaged stained glass and leadlight were not simply reinstated. Each panel was sandwiched between two new layers of glass to form triple-glazed sashes in new timber frames — the original colour and pattern preserved, the comfort transformed. The original native timber panelling, beyond saving, was replaced with warm American white oak. And where the old house could not be expected to meet modern life, the additions were made without disturbing its character: ground-floor central heating, a contemporary kitchen, present-day services — all there when you need them, none of them announcing itself.
One home, returned in full
Christchurch lost a great deal of its built heritage in 2010 and 2011, and most of it has not come back. Julius Terrace is the rarer outcome — a character home not repaired but built again, exact in dimension, true in detail, and warmer and better suited to modern life than the house it replaced.
“I don’t like change,” Martin says. With Julius Terrace, he didn’t have to.
Awards
Registered Master Builders House of the Year 2020 — National Craftsmanship Award · Special Award · Top 100 · Regional Supreme Winner · Regional Craftsmanship Award · Regional Category Winner · Gold Award. Won by Steve Brown Builders Ltd for the construction of this house.
Christchurch Civic Trust Award — 2019
Window & Glass Association NZ Innovation Award — 2019
Own a character home you don’t want to lose?
Whether you’re bringing one back or adapting it for the way you live now, the earlier the conversation, the more is possible.
Further reading: “Quake-wrecked mansion back as near-perfect replica” — Stuff
