Simonetta Ferrari was lazily reading the newspaper on Sunday some 22 years ago when a listing ad caught her eye.
The award-winning landscaper had long dreamed of a life in an Edwardian mansion (all before Downtown Abbey made that fashionable), and the advert for Gunyah Country Estate was an instant call to action.
She told OneRoof: “I have a big interest in houses and I particularly like the period in which this house was built. I have a real thing for anything of the Edwardian era. The literature, the clothes, the architecture, everything about that time.”
Ferrari had just ordered architectural plans to expand her Auckland home at the time but she was also looking for an excuse to do something different. “I was tired of the job I was doing and thinking I wanted to do something else. I was thinking I wanted to change jobs.”
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She knew that well-preserved Edwardian homes in New Zealand were few and far between so she acted quickly. Several months later and $610,000 poorer, Ferrari and her family were on their way to rural Canterbury.
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Gunyah Country Estate was established in 1912 for the son of former Prime Minister Sir John Hall, and is spread over 11.5 hectares near the Southern Alps.
The eight-bedroom homestead features rimu floors, Australian cedar panelling, a Jarrah hallway, and a kauri staircase, which, according to the listing, “evokes enduring grandeur with stunning leadlights”.
When Ferrari bought it, it had been turned into a bed and breakfast. It was just the challenge she looking for. “I had done tourist work before and stayed in places like this with my tourists. Because I was the private interpreter and tour guide, I know how it works,” she said.
But that wasn’t the only challenge facing the family. “Gunyah was a bit sad. It looked like an old folks’ home,” she said.
Luckily, the homestead had been built by master craftspeople and so its integrity was still intact. “The building has not been mucked around with because it was in the country, and it was just somebody’s farmhouse. They existed, they did the farming, and that was it. So, in a way it survived through neglect,” she said.
“Everything was beautifully made. If you run your hands on all the paneling, it’s still absolutely perfectly flush.”
The interiors of the homestead are a window to New Zealand’s Edwardian past. Photo / Supplied
Simonetta Ferrari with her family in 2002, just as they were heading to Canterbury. Photo / Nicola Topping
Ferrari and her family busied themselves bringing the estate up to scratch (a task made easier by the fact she already owned a sizeable collection of Edwardian furniture and furnishings).
They restored some of the outbuildings into self-contained cottages, which they were then able to rent out, and then tackled the gardens, something that was well within Ferrari’s wheelhouse, having won awards for her landscaping work.
The Canterbury earthquakes some 10 years later led to another upgrade, with the family forced to strengthen and modernise parts of the homestead that collapsed.
At the time of the disaster, she told the New Zealand Herald: “Our ceiling came down as I was trying to get out of bed. I can’t believe we got out.
“The quake was something: it was as if the house had been hit by a train 20 times, jolting back and forth and there was a bomb underneath. I have whiplash pain in my neck and back.”
Gunyah Country Estate sits on 11.5 hectares near the Southern Alps. Photo / Supplied
Luckily, her three children and the six guests who were staying at the estate escaped unharmed.
The family’s post-quake restoration took a year to complete but it was worth it, with the estate growing in popularity with tourists - both from New Zealand and overseas.
But 22 years as “lady of the manor” is time enough for Ferrari, and she has put the estate on the market for sale.
“I’ll never retire,” she told OneRoof. “I’ll always be doing something. But I have a few bits of metal in my body now and the physical aspect of working in the garden, bending down, making people’s beds, is getting a bit tricky. I’d love to stay here. But I don’t see it happening the older I get. It’s just the classic time in life when you move on. I’m not a spring chicken anymore.”
The 15-bedroom, 12-bathroom, 540sqm home is being marketed by Colliers agents Sally Hargreaves and Mick Sidey. “We’re really proud to be marketing [Gunyah],” Hargreaves told OneRoof. “It’s a beautiful property loaded with history and beautiful gardens.”
- 720 Sleemans Road, in Windwhistle, Selwyn, is for sale, deadline closing December 5
