Nairn Street Cottage

This is the oldest surviving original house in Wellington, still on its original site. It was built in eighteen fifty-eight by William Wallis — a carpenter who had worked on the Crystal Palace in London for the Great Exhibition of eighteen fifty-one, and who built field hospitals during the Crimean War.

Wallis chose this specific spot because of a nearby stream. The eighteen fifty-five Wairarapa earthquake had contaminated much of Wellington's water supply, and three years later, clean water was still hard to find. So a man who'd helped build one of the most ambitious structures in human history — the Crystal Palace, a glass and iron exhibition hall covering nineteen acres — came to the other side of the world and built a tiny wooden cottage next to a creek because he needed drinking water.

The Wallis family lived here for a hundred and twenty-seven years, across multiple generations. In nineteen seventy-four, Wellington City Council acquired the property under the Public Works Act. The plan was to demolish it and build council flats. William Wallis's own granddaughter, Winifred Turner, fought the demolition.

She won. The Colonial Cottage Museum Society saved the building, and it opened as a museum in nineteen eighty. It's Heritage New Zealand Category One. Inside, the rooms are furnished as they would have been in the eighteen-sixties. It's small, it's quiet, and it nearly became a car park. The distance between the Crystal Palace and a cottage in Mount Cook is about as far as a Victorian craftsman could travel, and this is where he stopped.