Memory box
It’s hard to have one eye on the mess one will leave behind, while the other is always on the look out for informative bits of paper that might come in handy one day. Although I am still some ways off becoming a hoarder, I will confess to keeping far too many newspaper clippings and the like, which the kids will have to throw out when I am gone.
In a slightly different class from the folders of clippings, are the booklets, catalogues and pamphlets that I have acquired over the years. Not very many items in this category of collectibles are about Hamilton, however. That is a shame because it is easy to overlook a place lacking a published history if you are a writer of a national history of some kind. It also makes it more difficult for Hamiltonians to appreciate the value and importance of what is right in front of us.
Sometimes out of towners enjoy the city’s treasures more than we do. An example of this can be found in the Summer 2002 edition of the Art Deco Society of Auckland’s magazine ‘Metropolitan Flyer’. The issue reprinted the itinerary of a Hamilton driving tour society members had taken prior to publication. Around 15 houses were included in the tour, almost all of them designed by Hamilton architect Terence Vautier.
Vautier was particularly adept at designing Art Deco houses for local businessmen in the 1930s and 1940s. Victoria Street boasts a number of Vautier’s Art Deco houses and his work is starting to become recognised by real estate agents when these dwellings come up for sale.
There’s another cluster of Vautier houses on the east side of the Waikato River, close to the Fairfield Bridge. Standing on the north-east side of River Road, two Art Deco houses built in the mid-1930s are local landmarks, or at least they were until a new brick show home was built in front of the northern-most of the two. The new house looks very nice, but it has completely ruined the outlook and curtilage of the Vautier house behind it. Happily its neighbour enjoys a much better relationship with the little shop at the bottom of its garden, even if the latest paint scheme of the ‘Feisty Needle’ is a little bit ‘shouty’.
Looking best of all, is the house on the other side of River Road that Vautier reputedly designed for RB and Patty (nee Masefield) Seabrook in a Spanish Colonial Revival style in the 1930s. The Seabrooks married in February 1936 and Robert Seabrook was Hamilton’s Austin dealer at the time. RB Seabrook Ltd was in Victoria Street, immediately south of Cadman’s Parking Station, now The Londoner pub. The firm advertised itself as ‘Waikato’s Dependable Motor Firm’. It would appear that Seabrook later became a trustee of the Waikato Savings Bank.
The Fairfield Bridge was completed in 1937 and it spurred on suburban development in Fairfield and, later, Chartwell.
It’s easy to imagine Mr Seabrook motoring home from work over the Fairfield Bridge, perhaps even driving a new Austin. The Spanish Colonial Revival style home he returned to would have been highly fashionable when it was built. The fact it differs from the Art Deco style for which Vautier is known, suggests the input of his clients, who might have taken their lead from Californian models. The style was popularised by the Panama-California Exposition held in San Diego in 1915 and the rebuilding of Santa Barbara after the 1925 earthquake.
Not only is the former Seabrook home an accomplished essay in the style, but its architectural quality is also maintained by the sympathetic treatment of the garage and perimeter wall. So often it is the fencing that undermines the quality of both new homes and historic ones around the city, but this stylish house shows that provisions for garaging, security and privacy can be handled in a sensitive fashion. Members of Auckland’s Art Deco Society likely admired the same qualities during their tour of Hamilton. Fifteen years later, I wonder how many locals value the historic and architectural values of Vautier’s houses, as opposed to the subdivision potential of their sites.