Monte Cecilia Park

Pah Homestead

The Pah Homestead was built between 1877 and 1879 as Auckland businessman James Williamson's "gentleman's residence".

Designed by Architect Edward Mahoney using the then fashionable Italianate style, the homestead was the largest home in the Auckland province at the time. The complex house remains largely as it was built, with almost all of its original door and window joinery, elaborate ceiling roses, parquet floors and marble fireplaces intact.

The tree-lined drive down to Pah Road also remains largely intact, although the lower parts of it now run through private properties adjoining the park.

After Williamson's death in 1888, the lavish establishment was taken over by the Bank of New Zealand and leased to the Anglican Church. The homestead subsequently housed St John’s School, under Canon Percy Smallfield, from 1902 until 1912. In 1913, the Sisters of Mercy and the Roman Catholic Bishop of Auckland, Henry William Cleary purchased the homestead.

Mother Cecilia Maher, together with seven other Sisters, were the first religious women to arrive in New Zealand in April 1850 from Ireland. During its ownership by the Sisters of Mercy and later the Catholic Diocese, the house served as an orphanage, novitiate house (for instructing novices to the Mercy Order), boarding school and emergency housing.

The council purchased the homestead in 2002 and extensively restored and adapted prior to the opening of the TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre. The attention to heritage detail has ensured the building has been faithfully restored, while benefiting from hidden modern services, security systems and structural strengthening.

See TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre website for details of opening hours.

Updated January 2011