The man who bought a town

Lester Rowntree is a self-confessed hoarder, who is filling the town of Otira with stuff – in every nook and cranny. investigates.

Cradled in the Southern Alps, Otira is the town you drive quickly past, perhaps even commenting to your companions, ‘‘who on earth would live here?’’

The town, about a two-hour drive west of Christchurch, sees little sunshine in the winter and driving West Coast rain much of the year – averaging about

5.5 metres per annum. Lester Rowntree has installed a tall pole by the Otira Stagecoach Hotel on which he plans to mark the local rainfall measurement, well beneath the 11m mark – a yearly average recorded not far away in the Hokitika Gorge.

Rowntree owns the hotel and much of the town – 18 houses, a dancehall and a fire station.

He bought the 25-hectare property in 2014 for a price he won’t disclose but he will tell you he has spent plenty of money and time on improvements. ‘‘The hotel was pretty run down when I got here but we have done a 100 per cent renovation on it, taken it back to what it would have been like in

1902,’’ Rowntree says.

Lester Rowntree, owner of the Otira Hotel.

It does not take long in his presence to realise the importance he places on history and heritage. As the Frank crew films, Rowntree reaches for curios and curiosities – the twoheaded

duckling, stuffed possums and rats, a rope-making machine, a segment of the first subterranean copper cable between New Zealand and Australia.

In his hotel, surrounded by

Lester Rowntree

antiquities, Rowntree is in showand-tell heaven.

It is no wonder he calls the Otira Stagecoach Hotel the most interesting hotel in the country. How does he quantify that? The publican says he ‘‘asked the first 150 people through the door and 147 agreed that it was’’.

It is not just the hotel that is packed to the rafters with Rowntree’s collections. He takes us to film the dance floor, with the ‘‘magnificent spring floor’’.

Only there is not much floor to see. The hall is overflowing with his Trade Me wins and clearing sale finds. ‘‘I am a hoarder,’’ he admits. ‘‘My partner said if you bring another wagon back, I am leaving. I got another five or 10 after that but she did leave.’’

Which means Rowntree is now on his own in Otira and wearing many hats. ‘‘I’m the publican, the bedmaker, the bottle washer, the cook ... the everything sometimes.’’

As a landlord of 18 houses, half of them tenanted, Rowntree says he also feels responsible for maintaining law and order in the town. A sign on the dancehall warns ‘‘A Class drugs will not be tollerated [sic]’’. Rowntree explains: ‘‘When I came here there were a lot of drug addicts and we have got rid of them all.’’

He is also refurbishing his housing stock, possibly New Zealand’s first kitset homes, fabricated in Hamilton and transported to Otira in 1923.

That is when the population of Otira numbered several hundred, boosted by the building of the Otira Tunnel and, prior to that, the town’s popularity as a stagecoach post. Rowntree has discovered his great uncle was a stagecoach driver at Otira and says it is that link that drew him there. He sees Otira as the perfect location for his grand $5 million plan – a plan he describes as ‘‘unique to the world, unique to New Zealand’’.

‘‘I am a hoarder. My partner said if you bring another wagon back, I am leaving. I got another five or 10 after that but she did leave.’’