Wellington's early architecture

[In Wellington t]he overall early European architecture and that of the Maori people is today hard to visualise because so few of the earliest buildings are still standing. Remnants of Te Aro Pa are exemplified only by ponga-trunk hut-wall fragments discovered by chance during excavations for a new multi-storey building in Taranaki Street in 2005. There are still some cottages from the 1850s, such as that at 251 Tinakori Road, Thorndon - one of the simplest possible vernacular house designs another example being Granny Cooper's house in nearby Ascot Street. The former sexton's cottage (1857) in Bolton Street off The Terrace is also a basic structure with a saddleback roof and a central gable emphasising the front door position - the porch and outbuildings are later additions, as is the corrugated iron roof, replacing the original wooden shingles. A rather more elaborate survivor, although moved from its original site, is Spinks Cottage in Dixon Street beside St John's Church. Built sometime between 1854 and 1863, it is a one-and-a-half storey, L-shaped weatherboard house with a steeply-pitched roof and front-facing gable at one end. Finials decorate the gables, and there are two dormer windows. William Spinks was a storekeeper who later became a wharfinger at the harbour. As far as we know, none of these buildings was designed by an architect, nor was the later Wallis Cottage in Nairn Street (1858) which was erected by the builder William Wallis in Victorian Georgian style. Jeremy Salmond's Old New Zealand Houses 1800-1940 uses Amos Rapoport's 1969 general term 'Pre-Industrial Vernacular' to describe the slightly more varied type of house built mainly for tradesmen in the towns between approximately 1850 and 1870. 'Pre-Industrial' is used because this was largely the time before steam-powered woodworking machinery became widely available, giving rise to the huge variety of ornamental components that could decorate the later bay villa. Salmond also coins the term 'Bay Cottage' to describe houses with one or more cross gables having L, T, U or H plans, and early photographs of Wellington show such houses scattered on The Terrace and in other areas. Multiple rows of workers' cottages continued to be very small and of simple type in this period.

- Geoff Mew & Adrian Humphris, Raupo to Deco: Wellington Styles & Architects 1840-1940, Wellington, p.27.