The construction of the first St Luke's Church began in 1859, on one of the five church reserves set aside by the Canterbury Association, the organisation that planned the settlement of Christchurch. It was the second church in the parish of Christchurch and was built to accommodate the overflow from St Michael and All Angels and for members of the Anglican congregation who lived on the north side of the Avon. As Christchurch prospered during the 1860s, a number of wealthier citizens moved out to the northern edges of the town. The new St Luke's parish (established 1868) encompassed 'all that part of the original Parish of Christchurch, lying to the north of a line drawn from the College down the middle of Colombo Street, thence along Armagh Street to the East Town Belt.'

The establishment of a separate parish required the appointment of a clergyman, and the provision of accommodation for him. St Luke's Vicarage was originally built as a residence for the Reverend Edward Atherton Lingard and his family. The size of the vicarage, and the provision of servants' quarters reflect both the wealth of the parish and the social status of the vicar.

St Luke's Vicarage was designed by the British architect Robert Speechly, who had been appointed to supervise the building of Christchurch Cathedral in 1864. However, lack of funding for the cathedral soon halted work on it. Speechly, assisted by his pupil and later his partner, William Fitzjohn Crisp, worked out the remainder of his four-year contract supervising other buildings undertaken for the Anglican Church Property Trustees. Such buildings included St Luke's Vicarage as well as Christ's College Chapel (1867) and St Mary's Church in Merivale (1866).

The vicarage is a large timber house, with Speechly's distinctive hoods over the ground floor windows and entrance. Ian Lochhead has said of the vicarage that it is 'one of the best and least modified examples of the Ecclesiologically inspired vicarage in New Zealand.' Under the influence of British architects closely associated with the Ecclesiological movement, a 'simple, earnest, moral Gothic architecture', Gothic in detail, but adapted for nineteenth-century needs and made from local materials, became seen as particularly appropriate for parsonages in the mid Victorian era. At St Luke's Vicarage, Speechly and Crisp reinterpreted these ideas using the plentiful New Zealand building material, wood. The vicarage is an important example of the adaptation of a English ideal to New Zealand conditions. Despite the ideals that prompted the design, the local history of the parish records that most vicars and their families found it an inconvenient building to live in.

St Luke's Vicarage illustrates elements of Christchurch's religious and social history. It is significant architecturally as one of the best preserved examples of Speechly's domestic work, and as a New Zealand vicarage inspired by the nineteenth-century Ecclesiological movement. In conjunction with St Luke's Church it forms an important part of the local landscape.