1966 & 2016 Maurice Mahoney Fendalton

The architect’s legacy has largely been obliterated from the landscape by the Christchurch earthquakes, but the Mahoney family home has been respectfully reinstated.

- Matt Philp

On the eve of the demolition of Maurice and Margaret Mahoney’s quake-damaged house, their four adult children were granted an indulgence: each was allowed to write in felt pen on the white block work, a serious taboo when growing up. It was a light moment during the last rites for what was not only a family’s home, but a model of Christchurch modernism, designed by one of its leading exponents. When the wrecking crew went to work a few days later, they bowled a piece of our architectural heritage.

And then, by some abracadabra, in early 2016 the Mahoney house was back on its Fendalton site – or something very much like it. Same footprint and dimensions, same sitting room, ceiling structure, cabinetry and other fittings. At the rear of that room, as if it had never left, stood Margaret’s grand piano, her sheet music, as ever, neatly slotted into the unit designed in 1966 by Mahoney. A re-creation? Or a re-imagining? For Mahoney, the truth lies somewhere in between. “It’s a repeat, but updated,” he says of his reprise of the house he first drew up half-a-century ago, when the signature Warren & Mahoney elements were confrontingly contemporary.

By 1966, he and Miles Warren were well into their stride as an architectural partnership, with the Dental Nurses Training School, Harewood Crematorium and College House completed, along with a number of innovative residential projects. “Miles and I were building quite a lot of houses in those days, and we’d adopted this style of block work and steeply pitched roofs, so I carried on with it here.”