Early History of the Site
The northern shores of the Waitemata Harbour are of significance to several iwi, having been explored and occupied since early human arrival in New Zealand. According to oral tradition, the Arawa canoe under Tama Te Kapua investigated the Waitemata. The canoe deposited a ritual obsidian core brought from Hawaiki on Te Mata (Boat Rock), an island to the west of Chelsea Bay, giving rise to the name of the Waitemata Harbour.
The Tainui canoe also landed at Te Hau Kapua (Torpedo Bay) in present-day Devonport before travelling to its eventual heartland in the Waikato. According to oral tradition there were people living at Te Hau Kapua at the time of the visit of the Tainui canoe. Physical evidence of very early settlement has been found on the foreshore where adzes were manufactured on stone working floors.
Tainui named the western headland of Te Hau Kapua, Te Kurae a Tura / Tura’s Point. A pa later occupied Te Kurae a Tura, the headland known more recently as Duder’s Hill. Other pa including the nearby Takamaiwaho; Takarunga / Mt Victoria; Takararo / Mt Cambria; and Maunga Uika / North Head, as well as recorded horticultural features, midden and other remains reflect a landscape intensively used by Maori.
By the eighteenth century, land in the vicinity was occupied by Kawerau, who held settlements along the Waitemata shoreline noted for their access to shark fisheries. The beach at Te Hau Kapua was the site of a late-eighteenth-century battle when a Nga Puhi, Te Kawerau and Te Parawhau alliance raided the Ngati Paoa pa, Takapuna, now known as North Head. Following Nga Puhi incursions in the 1820s, much of the North Shore was depopulated, assisting its purchase by the British Crown after formal colonisation in 1840. A small Maori settlement remained at Te Hau Kapua until 1863.
Devonport emerged as a colonial settlement with its use as a British naval station from the 1840s. Situated adjoining the site of the former naval magazine established in 1840-1 on Beach Road, the site on which Rockcliff was constructed (Lot 3 and Part Lot 4 in the 1859 village of Devonport subdivision) formed part of a Crown Grant issued to Auckland businessman John Logan Campbell in 1853. The area’s potential as a seaside suburb was recognised as early as February 1859 when notices appeared in the New Zealander offering land for sale by auction. Although the area was subject to some speculation and land subdivision in the 1860s, large-scale development emerged primarily during the economic boom of the 1870s and 1880s. With the establishment of reliable ferry services to and from Auckland, Devonport became a well-established residential suburb and a significant seaside resort in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Owners of the Beach Road property included David Burn (d.1875) - an editor of the New Zealander and of the Daily Southern Cross - who owned a tenanted house close to the beach. Wood turner John Jessie Swinnerton (1830?-94) purchased the land in 1891 and constructed a timber villa on the site soon after.
By the turn of the century, Beach Road (re-named King Edward Parade in circa 1902, but known locally as King’s Parade) was considered to be one of the main residential streets in Devonport, which were collectively said to be occupied chiefly by the families of city men whose homes were, ‘entirely removed and differing in aspect from the scene of their labours’ across the harbour in the commercial heart of Auckland. In 1919, by which time the Devonport waterfront was fully built up, Gilbert Sanford (1883-1967) purchased the Swinnerton property. The nineteenth-century house was relocated onto the eastern portion of the holding (Pt Lot 4) and on-sold in 1922.
Gilbert Sanford, the fourth son of Albert Sanford (1843?-1924) founder of New Zealand’s first large fishing company, had married Marie Wyatt Wright in 1907. The young couple had taken up residence in Buchanan Street, continuing a long family association with the seaside suburb where Albert had founded his fishing business shortly after his arrival in New Zealand in 1864.
Gilbert was one of at least four Sanford sons engaged in the day-to-day operations of the registered company that emerged from the family business in 1904. He had received a better education than many of his eight brothers, and as company secretary was prominent in the affairs of Sanford Limited. Gilbert presented evidence to a 1919 Royal Commission into trawling in the Hauraki Gulf; and in 1921 travelled to England to investigate the purchase of fishing vessels. His choice of a beachside residential site capitalising on views over the Waitemata Harbour and Auckland’s eastern suburbs reflected Gilbert’s growing status in Auckland’s business community as heir apparent to Albert as managing director of the company.
Construction of Rockcliff (1923)
A Council drainage plan, a mortgage and street directories indicate 1923 as the date of construction of the one-and-a-half storey Arts-and-Crafts-style house. In a difficult economic climate, Marie Sanford advanced her husband short term finance of £900; followed by a further £900 in 1925, amounts secured by mortgages over the beachfront home. These mortgages were extended in 1930 and not extinguished until sale of the property in 1938.
Rockliff was designed by Auckland architect William Cumming (1860-1947) and exhibited Arts-and-Crafts-style features that were a marked departure from the late-Victorian and early twentieth-century villas predominant on King Edward Parade’s beachfront sites. The residence exhibited informality in its planning, use of materials, fenestration, and setting. A random rubble retaining wall in place on the front boundary by 1923 was also likely to have been part of Cumming’s design. The sweeping line of the coping evoked curved elements evident on Rockcliff’s façade. The gate was framed by an overhead archway.
The cross gabled roof with wide eaves supported by verge rafters was a dominant feature that enhanced the picturesque character of the house as a building in-the-round rather than a façade. The contrast of dark timber trim against light-coloured stucco walls, and an arched roof form over the opening in the front entrance porch and over a bay window also added visual interest. Fenestration in the south and east elevations ranged from circular and oval openings, to rectangular diamond-paned casements. Small window openings reinforced a domestic scale, evoking qualities of snugness and cosiness that reflected Northern Hemisphere climatic and cultural influences of the Arts and Crafts architectural style adopted by well-do New Zealanders in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Internally, the front entrance within a corner porch opened into a small rectangular hall containing the staircase and a cloakroom. A lobby off the east side of the hall led into an east-facing kitchen that terminated in a sun porch. A south-facing bay window overlooking the harbour may have formed part of a sitting room, or lit a smaller space. A small single-storey wing centrally located on the west elevation contained a lavatory and a washhouse. The upper storey accommodated bedrooms, a lavatory, a bathroom and a small storeroom.
Rockcliff was one of comparatively few known residential commissions undertaken by Auckland architect William Cumming who was best known as the designer of educational buildings including Mt Albert Grammar School (1922) and Takapuna Grammar School (1926). Commercial premises to his design included the three-storey Sanford Building erected in Customs Street West in 1914-15, a firm of which he was director in 1922-4 and in 1933-44.
William Arthur Cumming, an inaugural member of the New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) in 1905, was President of the Institute in 1917. In 1919 he provided a site plan for relocation of the former Swinnerton house prior to designing Gilbert Sanford’s new home. Also in 1919, two major projects were completed to Cumming’s designs. Substantial additions and alterations to the former Choral Hall housed the science department of the Auckland University College. The second was Pridham Hall (Register no. 147, Category 1 historic place), built to accommodate New Plymouth Boys High School after destruction of the school buildings by fire - a structure opened by the Deputy Prime Minister, Sir James Allen. Cumming had been recommended to design Pridham Hall after the School Board approached the NZIA for a suitably eminent architect to undertake the project. The Edwardian Free Style Pridham Hall combining Elizabethan and Jacobean influences is recognised as one of three outstanding early twentieth-century examples of Jacobethan architecture in Zealand. In 1920, Cumming became the Director and a lecturer at Auckland University College’s fledgling School of Architecture; and was one of three distinguished architects appointed to assess competitive designs for the Arts Building of the University College.
Designed during the peak of his architectural career and currently Cumming’s best-known domestic work, Rockcliff - like Pridham Hall - reflected the continuing influences of British tends on New Zealand architecture well into the twentieth century.
Rockcliff’s builder, ‘E H Wood’, is likely to have been a local Devonport carpenter. Wood was listed in street directories as Edmond Harry Wood (resident at 52 King Edward Parade) in 1922, but as Edward Harry Wood (at nearby 31 Grey Street) in 1925.
Subsequent use and modification
Following Albert Sanford’s retirement in 1923, Gilbert became the managing director of Sanford Limited. By this time the company had diversified into seafood processing, retail, and restaurants as well as harvesting. During the 1920s, when the trawlers sailed at 8 am, ‘if they had not passed Devonport, where Mr Sanford resided, by 8.15 am he was on the telephone requiring an explanation’.
Sanford Limited continued to dominate the industry in the 1920s, selling fish locally into the Auckland market and by consignment in iced boxes to other North Island centres. With new trawlers providing larger catches, Sanford Limited was publicly listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange in 1924 and moved to new premises in Jellicoe Street the following year. The firm diversified into the rabbit trade, becoming the largest buyer of meat and skins nationally. Gilbert Sanford resigned as managing director in 1929 at the comparatively young age of 46 and retired to farm at Rakino Island which had passed into his sole ownership in 1927.
Gilbert Sanford’s Devonport home was tenanted for much of the 1930s by hosiery retailers and manufacturers’ agents Alfred and Mary Respinger prior to its sale to the Very Reverend Joseph Croke Darby (1871-1941) in 1938. The dwelling, described as consisting of six rooms, dressing room, bathroom and two lavatories and set in a beautifully laid out garden enjoying extensive harbour views, remained Darby’s home until his death in 1941.
Auckland-born Darby was one of three sons of New Zealand publicans to attend St Patrick’s College, Sydney, in the mid-1890s. Darby’s father Patrick (1832?-1910), a wealthy philanthropist who donated much land and money to the church, was a trusted adviser to a series of bishops of Auckland. His son Joseph Darby had as Dean of the Waikato (1916-18) commissioned construction of the Church of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary and presbytery - projects for which he had contracted large debts. A controversial character whose confrontational style led to conflicts with Bishops Lenihan and Cleary, Darby retired from active parish work in 1921 after two decades as parish priest in the Waikato.
Rockcliff was subsequently bought by Ruby Amelia Stenborg (1882-1967), the wife of piano repairer Gunnar Stenborg (1893-1986) a Swedish national. Ruby was the founder and major shareholder of The F. Moore Piano Company (1925-9) which had emerged out of the business of her late father. To finance Rockcliff’s purchase, Ruby may have sold the Warwick Chambers (Register No. 4589, Category 2 historic place), a five-storey commercial building which she had purchased on Auckland’s Queen Street in 1925.
Rockcliff changed hands twice in the 1950s, and again in 1972. The single-storey laundry wing was demolished in 1976, making way for a two-storey addition containing a library and a playroom / music room on the ground floor and a first-floor study opening onto decks facing north and south. The sunroom became a laundry. The following year, a family room with a pergola above was added, opening off the laundry (former sunroom). A swimming pool was installed in the outdoor living area in 1981. In 1994, a garage and accessory building at the rear of the site were replaced by a substantial two-storey structure incorporating a minor dwelling unit and garaging. A conservatory was erected over the first floor deck on the north side (rear) of Rockcliff in 1999.
Rockcliff remains in use as a private residence.
