Early history of the site
Whare Tane is situated in Epsom, and lies on the lower slopes of Maungawhau (Mt Eden). Maungawhau has a long history of human occupation. According to some accounts, the renowned military engineer Titahi of Ngati Awa was associated with the construction of a large pa there, which was later occupied by the Waiohua people. Extensive cultivations and related activity areas were located on volcanic soils on the mountain’s lower slopes. Maungawhau was part of the broader Auckland isthmus taken over by Ngati Whatua in the eighteenth century. No Maori occupation of the mountain is currently known immediately preceding Auckland’s founding as a colonial settlement in 1840.
Maungawhau marked the southern boundary of the first area of land transferred by Ngati Whatua to the Crown in 1840 for the creation of Auckland as the colonial capital. The summit was subsequently employed as the base survey point from which land in the North Island was subdivided in the mid to late nineteenth century. Epsom land near the foot of Mt Eden was subdivided into farms as early as 1842 as part of Auckland’s early rural hinterland. The site of Whare Tane was part of an 1865 Crown Grant (Allotment 94) that was on-sold in 1872 to wealthy colonial entrepreneur and politician Josiah Firth (1826-1897) for incorporation into his developing suburban estate, Clifton. A small pine plantation was located on part of the site. Shooting targets associated with a rifle range established in 1871 by the Provincial Government extended from the northwest corner of Allotment 94, across the end of what later became Clive Road.
In 1903 the northwest portion of the allotment was subdivided for sale to contractor William Henry and was later incorporated within a wider area purchased in 1909 by Winstone Limited for a quarry. Formed in 1904, the company was the successor of a general carrying and fuel supply partnership founded in 1869. Brothers W. and G. Winstone had operated a quarry on Mt Eden as early as 1870 in conjunction with their contract for the demolition of Point Britomart as part of harbour reclamation works. Profiting from contracts issued by the 1870s Vogel government, the partnership became one of the largest haulage firms in the Auckland region. Purchase of the Clive Road site reflected growing building supply interests and the production of materials for an early twentieth-century urban economy dominated by suburban construction.
The quarry in Clive Road was subdivided and sold in 1925. By this time Mt Eden was considered a place of beauty which also demonstrated New Zealand’s Maori roots.
Trevor Lloyd and his purchase of the site (1925)
One of the subdivisions was an irregularly-shaped section on steep terrain adjoining Mt Eden Domain. It was purchased in June 1925 by a prominent cartoonist and illustrator, Trevor Lloyd (1863-1937), for the construction of a family home. Contemporary development on adjoining land included the creation of tennis courts to one side and an access from Clive Road to the Mt Eden Domain on the other.
Lloyd is considered to have been a pioneer of etching in New Zealand, and at the time of his land purchase was the principal cartoonist for both the New Zealand Herald and the Auckland Weekly News. Born into a farming family at the Wade, north of Auckland, he was essentially self taught as an artist but may have had some lessons from the painter and engraver Louis John Steele (1842-1918). In 1883 Lloyd exhibited with the Auckland Society of Art, and again several times in the 1890s. In the early 1900s, he moved with his wife and young family to Auckland, where he began earning a living from art.
Lloyd’s first commission was to illustrate stories and articles for the prestigious monthly New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, published by Arthur Cleave. The magazine was commenced in 1899 by Auckland lawyer Frederick Baume (1862?-1910) on the premise that literature should lead the way in forging a national identity. It carried contributions from most of the top New Zealand writers of the day, including politician and scholar (later Sir) Apirana Ngata (1874-1950); novelist Jane Mander (1877-1940); journalist, historian James Cowan (1870-1943); and ethnographer, writer Elsdon Best (1856-1831). The publication was heavily illustrated by artists such Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947) and upcoming illustrator, cartoonist Kennaway Henderson (1879-1960).
In 1903 Trevor Lloyd joined the Auckland Weekly News as an illustrator, graphic artist and cartoonist, and from 1904 his cartoons also appeared in the New Zealand Herald. Later recognised as an artist, illustrator and cartoonist of national stature, Lloyd was noted for his depictions of New Zealand flora and fauna. In 1905 he created what is believed to have been the first New Zealand cartoon using the kiwi as a symbol for the nation.
In the 1890s and early 1900s, a dual patriotism was emerging in the colony which took pride in being both British and New Zealand. Lloyd’s cartoon depicted a rugby test victory over England in December 1905, during the first tour of the British Isles by an official and fully representative rugby team from New Zealand. Published in the New Zealand Herald, the image shows a large and aggressive kiwi - dressed in dark shorts of fern-leaf print design - on a rugby field, holding the tail of a defeated English lion. It was during this tour that the name ‘All Blacks’, was bestowed on the colonial rugby team. The team has also since been referred to as the ‘Originals’. The 1905-6 rugby tour has been regarded by some as representing a giant stride in the development of a sense of nationhood, shortly before New Zealand became a Dominion.
The kiwi was subsequently frequently used in cartoons as a symbol for the nation. Lloyd is said to have adopted the bird as his artistic signature and can be considered to have influenced popular culture as a household name and as a ‘generator of the daily laugh’. The London-based Westminster Gazette also published a cartoon in 1905 depicting a kiwi (New Zealand) and kangaroo (Australia) going to a colonial conference, which was reproduced in the New Zealand Herald at the same time as the All Blacks tour. By 1917 the term ‘kiwi’ was being used to refer to New Zealand soldiers and, later, to New Zealanders in general.
Concurrently, Lloyd developed a reputation as a political cartoonist, initially focussing on the activities of the reforming Liberal Government under Richard Seddon, and later Sir Joseph Ward. A cartoon marking the end of the colonial era in 1907, depicted Ward adorning a kiwi with a tail of eight peacock feathers, each bearing a letter of the word “Dominion”. According to Lloyd’s obituary (1937) his best-known cartoon appeared in September 1911, before the general election in which Ward was defeated, which showed Ward and his colleagues in a battered war canoe, heading for a rock under the escort of a shark labelled “Socialism”. Other objects of Lloyd’s scrutiny included the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), debates over the prohibition of alcohol, and events during the First World War (1914-18) when his cartoons were drawn ‘in every mood, reflecting the tragedy of that period and the humour that helped to sustain the Empire’s spirit.’
In the decade immediately before his purchase of land at Epsom, Lloyd also began contributing pen and ink illustrations to the Saturday supplement of the New Zealand Herald, and took up etching and dry point, eventually producing a large body of prints based on his bush drawings. At the time, etching was a neglected medium in New Zealand, with Lloyd being required to produce many of his own tools and to learn the craft ‘with little help from others’.
Construction and initial use of Whare Tane (1925-6)
Whare Tane appears likely to have been erected between July 1925, when a building permit was issued, and early 1927 when a street directory was published listing Lloyd’s name at the address. The house was one of many residential properties built on the lower slopes of Maungawhau in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as suburban settlement in Auckland spread southward. Existing drystone basalt walls - a picturesque feature of Mt Eden and its environs - bounded the north and west sides of the property before construction of the house began.
The architect for the new residence was Scottish-born John Anderson (1880-?), who had worked in the Government Architect’s Office of the Public Works Department in Wellington before setting up in private practice in Auckland.
The main house consisted of a three-storey building of unusual, flat-roofed design. Its style combined forward-thinking architecture of international origin with a strong awareness of New Zealand’s natural and cultural landscape. The latter was evident in the structure’s broader setting, aspects of Maori-influenced interior design and adoption of a te reo-based name. The intertwining of local and international, as well as old and new, was also symbolised by the combined use of basalt footings and reinforced concrete in the superstructure.
Whare Tane’s overall architectural style has been seen as a local adaptation of the Emil Bach house in Chicago (1915), a design by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959). Whare Tane’s use of concrete, a material Wright employed in several domestic designs in the early 1920s; the horizontal line of the massive roof which is echoed in the line of the balcony on the upper floor; and the location of the main entrance (at the side) are elements found in Wright’s Chicago and Prairie-style residential designs. Although Wright never confined himself to one material or one method of construction, he was especially interested in the possibilities of concrete.
Essentially a vertical block entered at the middle level via an entrance at the side of the house, the Epsom design may also loosely reflect aspects of the Millard house, Pasadena (1923) where Wright illustrated a capacity to produce a house modest in scale and compact in section as well as in plan. The Millard house was constructed two years before Whare Tane and was a marked departure from the long, low horizontal lines of Wright’s more expansive Prairie style devised at the beginning of the century.
Whare Tane was not the first New Zealand house to illustrate Wright’s influence. Waiohika, constructed on the outskirts of Gisborne in 1920 to the design of Hawkes Bay architect Louis Hay, was modelled on the Prairie house style.
Whare Tane’s builder was Archibald Bow Frame (1874?-1942), a stonemason by trade. Basalt for construction of the basement was quarried from the site.
The extensive use of indigenous-influenced elements in the house interior and ancillary structures can be seen to reflect Lloyd’s long-held interest in Maori culture. Lloyd is said to have drawn images of Maori from a young age, and was also a collector of Maori artefacts, many of which are now held by the Auckland Institute and Museum. By his death it is stated that he had ‘built up one of the largest private collections in New Zealand of greenstone ornaments, implements and other native objects.’ The use of interior motifs and carved furniture may also have been influenced by his brother Henry Evan Lloyd (1868-1955), a builder in Maraia, who had begun carving Maori designs on domestic items in his own house and garden in circa 1914. Prior to the construction of Whare Tane, a bach for the Lloyd family in the Waitakere foothills had also been erected in the form of a meeting house, with carvings supplied by Trevor Lloyd.
Carvings at Whare Tane included depictions of Maori heads on the newel posts, large spiral manaia forms for brackets on an interior doorway, and heads with protruding tongues for light switches. Lloyd had frequently incorporated illustrations of ‘little Maori imps with wide mouths and goggling eyes’ in his work, and also depicted Maori in his cartoons, often satirically. Recent perspectives have seen such representations as indicative of Lloyd’s political views, which are said to have favoured distributing land to Pakeha freeholders, and as revealing ‘aspects of the complex racial ideology of Europeans in the first decades of the twentieth century, a racial ideology that that we are still struggling to unravel…’.
The broader Pakeha use of Maori design has also been seen as a response to a growing nationalism and sense of place, in a similar way to Lloyd’s use of the kiwi in his cartoons and native flora in his etchings. A trend for incorporating Maori motifs, designs and carvings had previously emerged at the end of the nineteenth century along with the use of Maori house names, although the number of Pakeha New Zealanders using Maori-influenced design elements before the First World War (1914-18) remained small. Increasing interest in New Zealand identity in the 1920s may be seen in the use of Maori- and other New Zealand-influenced design in structures such as the Auckland War Memorial Museum (1924-9).
Subsequent modification and use (1927 onwards)
Lloyd’s interest in aspects of Maori culture continued after Whare Tane was completed. In 1927, he exhibited etchings of native bush and ‘Maori fancies’ at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts. In the same year a garage was constructed on his property which, like the main residence, incorporated Maori-influenced figures and a - possibly invented - te reo-based name, Te Whareka. A ‘root store’ bearing Maori-style decoration was excavated into the hill above the house.
A sunken front garden at Whare Tane incorporated a large amount of local stone in its revetments and paths. Interest in rockeries as a garden style grew out of a developing awareness and interest in the colony’s indigenous plants and alpine species as early as the 1880s. The trend accelerated following publication of David Tannock’s Rock Gardening in New Zealand (1924), after which rock gardens continued to enjoy immense popularity until the late 1930s. Stone walls along the front boundaries of residential properties were also popular and, as at Whare Tane, were kept low to allow the garden to be seen from the road. The Lloyds’ garden, located within a quarried area between the street and the residence, was particularly visible to passers by.
In 1930, Trevor Lloyd was replaced as principal cartoonist at the New Zealand Herald by Gordon Minhinnick. Lloyd continued to contribute to the Auckland Weekly News and to the Saturday supplement of the Herald until his retirement in 1936. His use of the kiwi as a national symbol persisted into his cartoon work of this period. Political drawings also remained wide-ranging, touching on many of the most important issues of the day including the Great Depression, the rise of fascism in Europe, and the election of New Zealand’s first Labour Government in 1935. Lloyd additionally continued to produce etchings of ‘native trees, plants, and birds’ and occasionally of Maori.
Lloyd died at Whare Tane in 1937, having been one of the country's leading political cartoonists for 32 years. Shortly before his death, it was stated that ‘his etchings of New Zealand flora are a real contribution to the country’s serious art.’
Whare Tane subsequently passed to Lloyd’s widow, Emily, and following her death in 1947, to the couple’s daughters Olive (1904-78) and Constance (1895-1982). Both women had attended the Elam Art School. Connie, who used the basement of the house as her workroom in latter years, was a portrait photographer but is chiefly known for her etching work.
Connie Lloyd’s death ended the family’s five-and-a-half-decade association with the place, and the property was onsold in 1983. A retrospective display of Trevor Lloyd’s work was organised in the same year at the Rotorua Art Gallery. Subsequent proposals for a minor addition at the rear of the house; and for an additional wing to the front of the basement level never came to fruition. Structural work to repair the entrance porch was carried out in 2010. The property remains in private ownership.
