This building was built in 1865 by John Shand and his partner, Herbert Coup, after they obtained a publican's licence to provide a hotel with eight beds, a public and private sitting room, a ladies' room and stabling for two horses. They built their hotel alongside the furrow known as Shand's Track, which ran from Christchurch to Springston. Ploughing a furrow between places was a common way of indicating the route travellers should take in nineteenth-century Canterbury. The building is two-storeyed and L-shaped. Clad in weatherboards, a verandah runs across the front of the main block.

By the end of the 1860s the hotel was doing well and catered for the Cobb & Co. coaches that travelled between Christchurch and Leeston.

In 1897 the licence for the hotel was sold to the pub in Teddington, which took over the 'Wheatsheaf' name. The previous Wheatsheaf building was subsequently used as a private dwelling, first by the Cuneen brothers, who were local farmers and butchers.

The house is representative of 1860s hotel accommodation and is also locally significant due to its links to Shand, at one time a prominent resident of Riccarton, founder of the Canterbury Jockey Club and in 1861 and 1862, a member of the Canterbury Provincial Council.