Karori Cemetery has been in use since 1891, with the Services’ Cemetery established in 1918 and the lychgate built as a memorial to World War One soldiers in 1921. It bears the inscription ‘Peace with Honour’. In the years immediately following World War One, memorials were erected throughout New Zealand to honour those who were killed. Gates and arches were reasonably common, many of them located at the entrance to schools or playgrounds where the young of the future could recall the deeds of the past. Lychgates traditionally form an entrance into a cemetery. The lychgate at Karori Cemetery was intended to be a shelter as well as the formal entrance to an extensive memorial area which includes a number of diverse monuments, but only the lychgate retains its original prominence.

The Wellington City Council heritage inventory entry for the lychgate includes the following description: ‘The lychgate is a small structure, 3.0 x 2.7 metres in plan built with several distinct building materials. The foundation is concrete. The lower part of the walls are limestone blocks which support an open structure of large section timber posts, and the roof is timber framed with shaped rafters and modern Decramastic tiling as sheathing. The gables at either end are half-timbered with stucco infill panels between the timber. The structure is open on the cemetery side, with a gate on the road (west) side, and there is a seat on either side under the shelter of the roof.’ The half-timbering in the gables give the structure an Elizabethan style with an Arts and Crafts influence in the timberwork detailing.

Of the few lychgates currently (2012) registered on the NHZPT Register, only one is known to be a World War One memorial: located in the Church of St Mary the Virgin Historic Area in Addington, Christchurch (Register no. 7516) it was erected in 1921 as a memorial to those parishioners who had died during World War One. An unregistered World War One memorial lychgate exists in Eketahuna.

Karori Cemetery Lychgate has historic and symbolic value as a war memorial and for its association with the services’ part of Karori Cemetery, of which it forms the entrance. Its prominent location on the main thoroughfare into the cemetery, combined with its design of exposed dark timber framing with white stucco infill gives it aesthetic value.