This two-storey weatherboard villa is an interesting combination of an older cottage (c. 1860s) in the American Carpenter Gothic style with a bay villa added in 1892. Nothing is known about the original cottage, but the later villa was built and owned by Henry Scott McKellar. A Certificate of Title dated 1899 describes McKellar as a ‘gentleman’ of Palmerston North. Seen from the street (east façade), the earlier cottage is on the left. Prominent features of the house are the decorative elements under the gables, around the entrance porch and at the first floor level, as well as the angled two-storey bay at the north-east corner. These suggest an inventive builder. The circa 1892 Thomas Ward Map shows a house at 230 The Terrace (Part of Town Section 450), but it is smaller than the current footprint of the house. This survey was drawn before the 1892 extension to the house, but shows that there must have been an extension built at some time between the 1860s cottage and the 1892 villa addition. McKellar sold the house in 1901 to James Devine, a solicitor, and his wife Margaret. Members of the Devine family occupied the house until the mid-1950s. In the late 1950s the house may have been used as a boarding house. The house was divided into two flats in 1962 and into five flats in 1965. In 1979 the house was repiled. Today (2012) there are five unit titles. The house, with its unusual and eclectic stylistic mix and distinctive two-storey corner bay window is an important part of The Terrace streetscape – one of a diminishing number of substantial wooden residences that once lined both sides of The Terrace.