Family History 1.106

Gaze History: NSG Memoir

34a Grange Road, Mt Eden

Less than 2km from the Bellevue Road home of Noel’s mother, this house is opposite Ashton Road, and around one-third of the way down Grange Road from Mount Eden Road.  Grange Road is another of the main connections between Mt Eden and Dominion Roads.  So again Noel was back to living a few hundred metres from a tram stop. Three Kings trams along Mt Eden Road were very frequent; it was one of the busiest routes in the city. The trip took about 15 minutes to the bottom of Queen Street in light traffic. 

500m from the top of Grange Road was the Mt Eden shopping area, and another 500m to the east from there, the Auckland Teachers Training College.  Grange Road is about 2 km from Auckland Grammar School for Franklin and a little further from, say, Epsom Girls Grammar, or from St Cuthberts where Olwyn went. 

 

The house was a thirties building of two storeys and a basement on a very small section. The upstairs section under the roof consisted of two large bedrooms, one with ensuite and the other with a handbasin in a cupboard.  The porch under the front roof served as a third upstairs bedroom. 

Downstairs the entrance straight off the drive was in the middle of the eastern wall.  It opened into a short hallway, from which the staircase rose. Behind this hallway was the one downstairs bedroom.  In front of the hallway was a room used as a study, which had a glassed porch in front. 

The northwest room was the sitting-room or lounge.  Behind it was the dining-room and then the kitchen, and the bathroom fitted between the back bedroom and the kitchen.  There was a detached garage across the courtyard, and just room for a small garden and pocket-handkerchief sized lawn beside it.  In front of the house was a smallish lawn at basement level.  The basement contained plenty of room for garden and other workshop areas and was blessed with a toilet, which Noel instantly christened “The Gardener’s Rest”. 

Near the front eastern corner of the house by the strip of flower garden which ran up the steep drive to the street was a flagpole. The house had a stencilled iron sign bearing its name: Karingal.