Company offers replicas of best of colonial houses

Press, 21 December 1978, Page 20

Company offers replicas of best of colonial houses

In the four months it s been opened to publi ewing, the exhibition ntse near the entrance o lona Vale in Fendalton .>ad has been inspecte. about 20.00/' visitors. The house is from one eight basic designs proiced by the Christchurch imber n erchants and niilders, Paynter and Hamilton. Ltd, to capture ”■ share of a specialised area of the New Zealand house market. Already the venture is beginning io generate an export business for such housing. Most of the visitors to the Fendalton Road property are merely interested sight-seers, but the idea has sufficiently excited home-builders to give the company orders for houses in this style. Eight houses have been chosen from the Paynter and Hamilton catalogue for building in or near Christchurch: another half dozen are about to be built further afield; and 30 orders are under negotiation.

Next month, all the precut timber and joinery for the most expensive in the range will be shipped to Sydney for an Australian customer: he has a handsome site for the house on the edge of Sydney Harbour and two Christchurch carpenters will cross to Sydney to supervise the job. Two Australian builders have sought licences to erect the replica houses using the materials fabricated in Christchurch. One Two ideas merged in the setting up of the Replica Homes business by Pay. nter and Hamilton. The concept of reproducing the structure and materials of colonial houses originated in the mind of Mr Michael Hutcheson when he was searching for an old house for himself. He could not find what he wanted in Christchurch in the right place or condition. He had friends who shared the same problem and he did not want an architect’s interpretation or modi-

fication of a century-old rtyle.

For its part, Paynter md Hamilton wanted to stimulate the house-build-tig market in a time when big construction contracts ire not easily won by any of the major builders. The firm had the timber resources and the machinery to mill and process the materials. The next step has been to promote the idea and put the materia’s and designs into the hands of licensed builders throughout New Zealand. “In doing this our company has really gone a full circle.” says the firm’s senior director, Mr J. M. Paynter. Twenty years and

more ago the firm was putting up as many as 200 dwellings a year. More recently it has concentrated on the timber bus' ness and on many of Christchurch’s biggest building contracts.

An Auckland branch of Replica Homes has been set uv and the first house will be on exhibition in South Auckland next March. A show home was opened in Invercargill last week and more than 2000 visitors went though it in two days. The Invercargill builder who has acquired the licence has plans for a group of nine of the colo-nial-style houses on the

shore of Lake Te Anau. Alexandra will see a sample of the houses soon, and builders are taking up the franchise in v elson, Wellington, and 'Dunedin. Mr Rich Mr Richmond Paynter is in charge of

promoting the scheme. “We want to feature the best use of. timber." he says. Native timbers are reserved for interior finish where appearance is important. The framing and weatherboarding is pinus The house prices range from about $23,1X10 to $65,000 for the largest and most elaborate. Most customers seem to want a few variations of their

own; but generally the cost is little more than standard housing of similar quality. The factory preparation of materials, the bulk production of even the most elaborate mouldings and joinery, and the shipping of all the materials in a whole-house package moderate the cost ‘ putting up the homes. Each house is a copy of one of the originals found ii. Canterbury. Nelson, and Otago, "We have cheated a little,” says .Mr Hutcheson. who did much of the research on which the designs were founded. “We have put the kitchen in a sunny corner of the house — something that

was not usually done a century ago. The floors, walls, and ceilings are all insulated. These are things we have done to meet today’s needs.’’ The idea of replica houses, and of trying to chieve a high degree of authenticity, is not likely to he restricted to reproducing houses from the colonial era. Encouraged by the success of other builders who have turned back to older styles of housing, and by the early response to their own scheme. Paynter and Hamilton may well be looking for designs that have proved popular from other periods.