Highwic Restoration by Salmond Reed Architects

ArchiPro Project Summary - Comprehensive restoration of Highwic, a premier timber gothic revival house in Epsom, Auckland, enhancing its role as a historic house museum while preserving its authentic architectural features for future generations.

Title:: Highwic Restoration
Architect:: Salmond Reed Architects
Category:: Community/; Public and Cultural
Region:: Epsom, Auckland, NZ
Building style:: Colonial
Photographers:: Salmond Reed Architects
Ben Levy

Highwic, in Epsom, Auckland is one of New Zealand’s finest timber gothic revival houses, which has become Auckland’s best-known historic house museum. Salmond Reed Architects led a full internal and external restoration, safeguarding its future, and ensuring that the restored house provides an authentic impression, transporting visitors back in time and adding immeasurably to the authenticity of their museum experience.

Project Gallery

The house first built in 1862 for substantial local land owner Alfred Buckland, exemplifies the ‘carpenter gothic’ style, which replicate, in timber, details found in stone gothic buildings. The style is known for their charm, quaintness, picturesque massing and ornamentation, and are typified by details such as decorative filigree, diamond-pane windows and pointed-arch detailing on doors. Highwic features many of these elements in abundance and is New Zealand’s leading example of this style with its significance recognised by its NZHPT Category 1 listing, and scheduled Category A listing.

Salmond Reed Architects were engaged by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga to advise, specify and oversee repair works to the historic house museum both externally and internally. The necessary work involved many complex specialist trades relating to the repair of traditional materials, particularly concerning the weathertightness, paint colour scheme, and interior representation.

Weathertightness

Extensive repair work was required to the roof coverings to render the building weathertight. The materials involved included lead, copper, zinc, galvanised steel, slate – the main roof was re-roofed in Welsh slates hand-shaped to match the originals and new lead valleys were replaced. Limited seismic strengthening was added to the chimneys and roof structures.

Paint Analysis and Re-painting

Exterior and interior repainting offered the opportunity to undertake paint analysis to understand historic decorative schemes, but also consideration of the use of traditional paint products and formulations such as distemper and products appropriate to the age and heritage values of the property. In liaison with Dr Donald Ellsmore, a leading Australian conservation specialist, an intensive study and analysis of Highwic’s historic paint layers were carried out.

This study reinforced the evidence apparent in historic document and photographs, that a variety of colours externally had been used to emphasise the hierarchy of decorative detailing peculiar to the carpenter gothic style.

A bland paint scheme imposed in conjunction with renovation work in the 1960s and 1980s had completely obliterated this emphasis of colours to highlight architectural details. Following the recommendations of the Conservation Plan of 1998, paint analysis was undertaken in several of the interior rooms and all areas have now been completely redecorated using traditional distemper paint for walls in muted colours of the period and with the original joinery colour (fawn or ‘drab’) restored.