Family History 1.102

THE HOUSES

Noel in 1965

 

Noel Gaze had an ambition when young to be an architect.  Even in the forties he was still toying with idea of designing his own home. In the fifties he did so, with the holiday home at Murray’s Bay. 

He had a developed sense of the time in which he lived and the place where he spent his days. So it seems appropriate to set the scene by introducing the houses he spent time in.

 

75 Bellevue Road, Mt Eden

 

This late nineteenth century villa, built in 1894 soon after Fred and Julia were married, was Noel’s home for the early part of his life.  The original building was renovated extensively in the thirties by builder Alf Pearce, who was married to a cousin of Noel’s. 

Bellevue Road is one of the main connecting streets between Mt Eden Road and Dominion Road.  It leaves Mt Eden Road high on the slope of the “mountain” at St Barnabas’ Church and drops nearby the Mt Eden School to a flat area, ending in what was in earlier days a large depression which had been a rubbish tip and later (and still) a small park area on Dominion Road, midway between the traffic lights at View Road and those at Valley Road. 

Bellevue Road was close to the tram service along Dominion Road.  But Fred and Julia, accompanied by Doris, used to walk to and from their shop in Karangahape Road everyday except Sunday, down in the morning, back for dinner, down after dinner and back for tea. And on Sundays they did the same trip twice to Church at the Tabernacle, just around the corner from the shop. Each way this trip is at least 3 km.

75 Bellevue Road around 2000

This house had the return verandah, the coloured glass windows and doors, the ornate suffits of the original design.  It had Edwardian heavy wooden Venetian blinds, ornate Chinese pattern wallpapers, and a dark, ornately wooden vestibule halfway down the hall. In the late thirties the bedrooms still had china washbasins, washstands, with china jugs, soap dishes and chamber-pots. 

At that time Fred still cleaned the knives every Saturday morning with an abrasive cleaner.  Stainless steel was too modern.  The one concession to modernity was the building of a concrete-block garage in the northern corner of the section to house the car.  The garage was opened with due ceremony (cutting a ribbon by driving the car out) not long before the second war broke out.