By Roselyn Cloake
A sweeping driveway will lead you to a Neo-Gothic style mansion. Castle Claremont was reported to be one of the closest home Timaru has to a royal estate. Set on 11 hectares in a picturesque park-like setting, Castle Claremont is fitted out with 10 bedrooms, five bathrooms, a formal dining room, a library/billiard room, reception facilities and a chapel. Castle Claremont was built in 1884 for early settler George Hampton Rhodes and his wife Henrietta. In the past, it also operated as a Marist Brothers' training centre and as a rehabilitation facility before being transformed back into the grand home. The castle is the work of leading Christchurch architects, JJ Collins (1855-1933) and RSD Harman (1859-1927). Collins and Harman, who were the successors to the practice established by William Armson in 1870, designed St Mary's Anglican Church in Timaru as well as a number of houses for members of Canterbury's rural elite in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including, for GH Rhodes’ brothers, ‘Blue Cliffs’ for RH Rhodes in 1889 and AEG Rhodes’ Christchurch town house ‘Te Koraha’ (1883-1903). The firm also designed ‘Meadowbank’ at Irwell for a cousin, GE Rhodes (1891).
One of the loveliest things about Christmas is the way it draws people together. At the end of the year, conversations slow down, tables fill up, and stories have room to surface.
My husband and I were invited to the Aoraki Foundation’s donors’ afternoon tea for a Giving Tuesday event at Castle Claremont recently. at Castle Claremont, which included a facinating presentation by Eleanor Cater, CEO of Community Foundations of Aotearoa New Zealand. Eleanor has completed a Masters in Philanthropic Studies, and her work explores how generosity, legacy, and place intersect. We have since stayed in touch, and she has generously shared material that stayed with me long after the afternoon ended, such a facinating read! communityfoundations/women-reshaping-philanthropy
It was a special setting for those conversations. Castle Claremont is a grand house, layered with history and stories, and we were fortunate to be shown through it by the current owner. Walking through its rooms,
I was ycurious about the many people who have lived, worked, gathered, learned, and reflected over the floorboards over the years. That visit sent me on a small history hunt, to learn more about the castle and its story...
Eleanor Cater | MA Philanthropic Studies (Dist) CEO Community Foundations of Aotearoa New Zealand. Addresses guests from the Aoraki Foundation donors afternoon tea with a really inspiring talk about what she has learned about philanthropy. Photo: Richard Brown
Before getting too far into the house itself, I found myself thinking about the land beneath it. Its probably a good place to start this blog. Castle Claremont sits on Waipōuri, also known as Mt Horrible, the site of the most recent volcanic activity in the South Island around 2.5 million years ago. Lava flowed from this area like fingers to what is now the sea, cooling to form the reefs and terraces and the rolls that shape Timaru today. From that volcanic activity came Timaru’s bluestone, a basalt rock quarried locally and used for bridges, drains, harbour works, and buildings across the town, including Castle Claremont.
That volcanic legacy also explains why Timaru grew where it did. The reefs created by those ancient lava flows formed a rare natural harbour along an otherwise exposed coastline. Long before breakwaters and wharves, ships anchored offshore and goods were brought ashore by surfboat. Timaru exists where it does because of this meeting of lava and sea.
Castle Claremont is made from that history. The lava that once flowed from Waipōuri cooled into basalt, later quarried as bluestone. That ancient rock was cut, dressed, and stacked by hand to form the walls of the house. Deep time, human labour, and architectural ambition are quite literally locked together in stone.
The beautiful facade and entrance built of bluestone and Oamaru stone to make Castle Claremont. George's marriage to Alice Henrietta Thierens (1862-1938) in September 1887. The couple had three children. Rhodes had acquired the property, which had originally been part of ‘The Levels’ run, in 1884 and held it until 1908. He was the son of George Rhodes of ‘The Levels’ and part of the large Rhodes family that built a number of grand country homes in Canterbury in the later 19th century. After 1901 the Rhodes family were in England for a decade whilst their children were being educated. Farms were balloted in the Claremont Settlement, created by the subdivision of the Claremont Estate after government purchase, in August 1912. HT Rosendale held the homestead block at that time, having purchased it from Donald Macfarlane in 1911. The Catholic Marist Brothers bought the property in 1932 for use as a training centre for priests, known as St Joseph’s Novitiate. The Brothers built a chapel beside the homestead in 1955 and, after 1980, the use later changed to an alcohol and drug rehabilitation centre. In 1999 John West purchased the property and converted it for use as a boutique hotel and wedding venue. In the same year the remains of priests buried near the homestead were removed and reinterred in Temuka Cemetery.
The story of Claremont also begins close to the shoreline. In 1851, George Rhodes established his first home in Timaru in a modest cob cottage on George Street, near the landing place. If that cottage were standing today, it would sit beside the former Landing Service building, rescued and conserved by the Timaru Civic Trust. A plaque on the building acknowledges the cottage as Timaru’s first European house. Together, these sites links us to the town’s beginnings, when shelter, trade, and communication clustered close to the shore.
This year, I went on a side quest that took me back to that shoreline, and into the life of Ann Williams. Around 1856, Ann and her husband Sam Williams moved into the 1851 Rhodes cottage on George Street. Elizabeth and George Rhodes had moved to a basic slab hut of Totara and later to their perminant home at the Levels Estate near Pleasant Point.
1854 Elizabeth Rhodes born in 1835 joined her husband and settles in Timaru. She was the second European women to live in South Canterbury. Her first home is a tiny thatch roofed cottage on the beach, next to the Landing Services Building that you see today. George and Elizabeths son, George William Wood Rhodes was born August 18, 1855 and died 9 August 1859, one of the first European children to be born in South Canterbury, but wasn't mentioned in the history books as Timaru's first Eurpean baby. Perhaps that was because he was born near Pleasant Point. Their fourth son George Hampton Rhodes was born at the Levels Station on 13th February, 1862.
Levels homestead during the late 1850s. Elizabeth remained deeply attached to The Levels station. Frequently visited to check on the trees she had planted years before. She recalled the early days: The homestead’s small steps and sleeping platform for a maid. Her baby was born in that home. Māori visitors would often sit outside in the morning, surprising her as she emerged from her bedroom.
George junior married Miss Alice Henrietta Thierens of Otaio in 1884 and moved to Claremont House, 222 Mt. Horrible Rd, a famous Timaru neo-Gothic style home where he lived for 25 years.
The Williams and the Rhodes lives were closely linked. Sam helped work the shore station associated with Rhodes interests, landing goods and supporting the fragile settlement. When a hotel was developed on the George Street block beside the landing place, it was a shared arrangement. The George owned the building. Sam owned the chattels. Together, they created a place of welcome and rest for those arriving by sea.
In 1851 George Rhodes and his brothers William and Robert established the Levels, South Canterbury’s first pastoral run. George moved 500 sheep and some cattle from Akaroa to Timaru. The brothers took a look further south and purchased 75,000 acres between Opihi and the Pareora Rivers. They named this new run ‘The Levels’, after one of their father’s properties back in England. The first house is remembered by a plaque on the Landing Services Building Wall. 126 acres of ‘The Levels’ is now known as the Central Business Centre of Timaru! George and his wife Elizabeth (seen here) built and lived in this two-roomed, 9- by 3-metre cottage. It had slab walls, a thatched roof, and a clay floor. The couple only lived in the cottage for a short time before newer homes were built in 1856 and 1862 The cottage was restored in 1951 and now stands on a private historic reserve. South Canterbury Museum Reference: 1923. 1858 The modest flock of 500 increased to 30,000, and a few years later to over 100,000. At this time the property comprised three runs, amounting in all to a 159,000 acres. The old hut built when the brothers and families first went on the station still stands in the garden at Levels.
When Mrs. Rhodes first arrived in South Canterbury, the area was full of wild pigs, dogs, paradise ducks, pukaki, kakas, and wekas. As swamps were drained, many wild animals and birds disappeared, some nearly to extinction. According the South Canterbury Jubalee history book, she worked to counter this by importing English birds. Birds such as goldfinches, linnets, redpolls, hedgesparrows, skylarks, pheasants, yellowhammers, and starlings were introduced before the end of 1876.
Margaret Hornbrook is recorded as the first European woman known to settle permanently in South Canterbury. In 1851, William Hornbrook’s brother Major Alfred Hornbrook applied for a 12,000-hectare pastoral run near the Opihi River — only the second in South Canterbury. Alfred Hornbrook remained based at Mount Pleasant near Lyttelton, while William went ahead to manage the new property, which he named Arowhenua Station. Two years later, Margaret followed with their two small daughters, one was called Caroline, travelling by sea on the Despatch and arriving in February 1854. In 1854, a son, William Richard (known as Richards Hornbrook), was born—the first white child in South Canterbury. Imagine that landing: no jetty, no roads, no fences, just open plains and wind-tossed tussock. She was, as far as the records show, the first European woman to live permanently south of the Rangitata River. When William died in 1882, Margaret managed the property herself for decades. In 1897, she laid the foundation stone of the Temuka Pioneers’ Obelisk, a monument honouring the settlers of the district. Other women may have passed through with sealing or whaling crews, but no records show any earlier permanent female settlers. Margaret’s life is one of the earliest we can trace clearly through letters, newspapers, and buildings still standing today. Margaret lived ten miles from The Levels, helping break isolation for the Rhodes family.
Elizabeth was the first European woman to cross the Canterbury Plains. She like Margaret witnessed extraordinary change. Grain and wool stores rose where her beachside Rhodes cob cottage once stood, railway sidings replaced the places where she had gathered stones, and a modern harbour stretched into the sea where whaling boats had once anchored. Steel bridges made river crossings safer, wheatfields transformed the region into “the granary of New Zealand”, and London buses proudly advertised prime Canterbury lamb as the world’s best. In January 1890, one of her children went to wake her and found she had quietly passed away, joining, as it was said, “the lone grey company, before the pioneers”.
The whaling ship Caroline had brought supplies to Sam Williams there half a century earlier. Hoani Kahu, a respected Māori chieftain, frequently visited Beverley in his later years.
Ann’s story is both powerful and heartbreaking. She was the mother of the first recorded European baby born in Timaru. For a time, her family was the only one living on the beach. She helped welcome the first 17 settlers to the area, and later the 110 immigrants who arrived on the Strathallan in 1859. In 1860, Ann collapsed in the doorway of that new hotel and died. Her life in Timaru was brief. Her opportunity to make a longer impact in the world was snuffed out.
Photograph of the foot of George Street, Timaru, circa 1868. The building is pictured in the centre is a landing service building (either the Timaru Landing and Shipping Company or the George Street Landing Service), while Rhodes' original cottage is to the left.
Learning about Ann, and then reflecting on Elizabeths and then Alice's lives tells me more about the Castle at Claremont, I became more aware of how much impact is shaped not just by intent, but by circumstance. Both lived on land formed by the same lava flows. Both women contributed to community life in ways that were rarely recorded. It seems only some women had the financial security, longevity, and social position that allowed their influence to extend over decades rather than years. Or maybe it was just good luck.
By the time George Hampton Rhodes, son of George and Elizabeth Rhodes of The Levels, built Claremont in 1888 following his marriage to Alice Henrietta Thierens, Timaru was no longer an uncertain outpost. Designed by leading Christchurch architects Collins and Harman, the two-storey homestead was conceived in the Domestic Gothic Revival style. Its square footprint gives it a strong, grounded presence, while multiple steep gables animate the roofline. A return veranda wraps around three sides, and a gabled entrance porch breaks through on the north-east elevation. Lancet motifs, corbelled eaves, crocketed gable ends, paired veranda posts, and grouped double-hung sash windows reflect both craftsmanship and confidence.
Alice Henrietta Rhodes at Claremont House south Canterbury Museum 1234a
George was deeply involved in community life, serving as President of the Timaru Yorkshire Society and as a member of the South Canterbury Education Board. A keen sportsman, he won several steeplechase races, including the Grand National, and was an active patron of the South Canterbury A and P Association.
A study of the floors and threshold when entering castle Claremont. - Photography by Roselyn Fauth.
The materials are integral to the story. Bluestone quarried on site anchors the house physically to Mt Horrible, while contrasting Oamaru limestone, sourced from the Otaio estate of Alices’ uncle Thomas Teschemaker, softens and refines the composition. Timber framing and a slate roof completed a house. When you visit it doesn't feel like an experiment. It feels like a statement of permanence.
For more than a decade, Claremont was the centre of an active social life, and in 1902 it was leased by Governor-General Lord Ranfurly during his visit to South Canterbury. Later, like many large country houses, it adapted to changing needs. From 1932 it became St Joseph’s Novitiate under the Marist Brothers, functioning as a boarding and training school for boys and young men preparing for religious life. A chapel was added in 1955, anchoring this chapter both physically and spiritually. Later uses included rehabilitation and community care, before the property was converted in 1999 into a boutique hotel and venue. Today it is widely known as Claremont Castle.
I would love to be able to offer a clear list of charitable donations or philanthropic acts by the people connected to Castle Claremont, but I couldn’t find specific records of that kind. That absence is telling. In earlier generations, generosity was often informal and assumed. Homes were opened, meals were shared, labour was given, and private spaces were used for public purposes without expectation of recognition. What survives in the record are buildings and events, rather than the acts of care that helped communities function.
That is why it felt so fitting to be at Castle Claremont for an Aoraki Foundation gathering, reflecting on legacy and place-based giving. Just three years ago, the Foundation had raised around three million dollars to support our region. This year, that figure has doubled. Earlier in 2025, after receiving a Woman of the Year acknowledgement, I joined the Aoraki Women’s Fund, a giving circle dedicated to uplifting and supporting girls and women across our region. It felt like a continuation of a much longer story.
Spending an afternoon at Castle Claremont taught me that legacy is not a straight line. It is shaped by land, by time, and by circumstance, but also by who is given the chance to endure.
Some people connected to this place had wealth, longevity, and influence. Others, like Ann Williams on the beach below, could be more remembered for her strength, generosity, and resolve, but far less time. Both mattered. Both contributed. But only some lives left visible traces in stone, records, and institutions.
Claremont itself has carried many roles. A family home. A vice-regal residence. A boarding and training school for boys and young men. A place of education, discipline, and faith. Later, a place of care and recovery. And now, once again, a place of hospitality and gathering. Each chapter adding to the castles story.
Listening to conversations about modern philanthropy in a building made from ancient lava was a reminder that generosity evolves. What once looked like open doors, shared meals, education, or service now takes the form of giving circles, women’s funds, and place-based investment. The shape may have changed, but I dont think the impulse has.
An afternoon at Castle Claremont reminded me that impact is rarely just about money. It is also about opportunity, time, and the structures that allow care to become legacy. And it left me hopeful that, as stewardship increasingly sits in women’s hands, more lives will have the chance not only to give, but to be remembered.
I love the detail of the doors throughout the house, and imagining who passed through them. - Photography by Roselyn Fauth 2025.
Rhodes years, and leaving the keys behind
George Hampton Rhodes and his wife Alice Henrietta Rhodes moved into Claremont in 1888, shortly after their marriage. This was not a pioneering household scraping by at the edge of settlement. George was a second-generation settler, the son of George Rhodes of The Levels, and Alice came from the well-established Teschemaker family of Otaio. She was the youngest daughter of of John C Theimens of Otaio. Together, they built Claremont as a statement of confidence in South Canterbury’s future.
For more than a decade, Claremont was their everyday world. Children were raised here. Guests were received. Meals were shared on the veranda. The rhythms of rural life unfolded within walls built from bluestone quarried on site and limestone brought through family connections. The house was designed to host as much as to shelter, and during these years it established a reputation for order, comfort, and hospitality.
Then life shifted, as it often did for families of their standing. After 1901, George and Alice travelled to Britain so their children could be educated there, a common choice among colonial families with the means to maintain close ties to the wider Empire. Rather than shutting the house up, they leased Claremont, allowing it to continue functioning as a lived-in place rather than an empty monument.
The decision to move abroad, and open to rent, kept the house active, maintained, and socially visible. And it set the scene for the next chapter in Claremont’s life, when the doors would open to an unexpected new resident.
When Castle Claremont became vice-regal
In 1902, Castle Claremont was leased by Lord Ranfurly, then Governor-General of New Zealand, and for several months functioned as a working vice-regal residence. According to Timaru District Council’s Historic Heritage Item Record, supported by contemporary reporting in newspapers such as the Timaru Herald, Lord Ranfurly lived at Claremont during his South Canterbury visit that year.
At the time, New Zealand was still a British colony, and the Governor-General acted as the King’s representative, holding real constitutional responsibilities. He opened Parliament, gave Royal Assent to legislation, appointed ministers and judges on advice, and was expected to maintain a visible presence throughout the country. Extensive regional travel was not optional. It was central to governance.
Lord Ranfurly, formally Uchter John Mark Knox, 5th Earl of Ranfurly, served from 1897 to 1904 and was known for his active engagement with provincial centres. In towns without Government Houses, suitable private residences were leased, provided they could accommodate staff, host official functions, and uphold the dignity of the Crown.
Castle Claremont met those expectations. Built only fourteen years earlier, it was solid, well appointed, and already known as a place of order and hospitality. During Ranfurly’s stay, the house shifted from private family home to a centre of official activity, hosting civic engagements and administrative routines.
That this occurred in Timaru reflects the town’s growing importance as South Canterbury’s principal port and urban centre. For a brief period, a house built from volcanic stone quarried on site became the operational home of New Zealand’s head of state.
By the time the government purchased and subdivided the Claremont Estate in 1912, the Rhodes family had already moved on. The house had passed out of family ownership The Rhodes sold to Donald Macfarlane who then pby H. T. Rosendale at the time of the 1912 ballot as part of a broader shift as large estates across South Canterbury were broken up.
George Hampton Rhodes died in 1914, while Alice lived on until 1938, outlasting both her husband and their years at Claremont, as the house moved into an entirely new chapter of its life.
George Hampton Rhodes is remembered in his obituary as a man shaped by education, land, and public service.
Born at Levels Station in 1862, he belonged to the second generation of the Rhodes family in South Canterbury. Educated at Christ’s College and later Jesus College, Cambridge, he returned to New Zealand and settled at Claremont, Timaru, which he held for about twenty-five years. During that time, Claremont was both a working estate and a centre of social life.
Rhodes played an active role in community affairs. He served as president of the Timaru Yorkshire Society and as a member of the South Canterbury Education Board, reflecting the civic responsibilities expected of prominent landowning families. He was also a patron of the South Canterbury Agricultural and Pastoral Association, demonstrating a sustained interest in agricultural development.
His obituary records his enthusiasm for steeplechasing, in which he enjoyed notable success, including winning the Grand National. This sporting life sat alongside his agricultural interests, reinforcing Claremont’s place within the rural economy rather than as a purely ornamental residence.
His marriage to Alice Henrietta Thierens, daughter of John Cornelius Thierens of Otaio, further linked Claremont to influential South Canterbury families. Their marriage was the first to be solemnised in Christchurch Cathedral, a detail noted at the time as a social milestone. In later years, Rhodes lived chiefly in England.
When he died in 1914, he was survived by Alice and their children. The obituary presents him as his era expected: a public man defined by education, service, sport, and stewardship of land.
Seen through this lens, Claremont is more than a grand stone house. It stands as a physical record of a life lived within the expectations of colonial leadership, where status carried obligations, and legacy was built through institutions as much as architecture.
This is the hall to the nanny's bathroom, bedroom and the childrens nursery.
Born in 1862 in Devon, England, Alice came to Canterbury through well-established family connections. Her father, John Cornelius Thierens of Otaio, belonged to the pastoral networks that shaped South Canterbury’s early settlement. Thomas Teschemaker’s Otaio estate’; Teschemaker was Alice Rhodes’ uncle. When Alice married George Hampton Rhodes in December 1887, their wedding was recorded as the first to be solemnised in Christchurch Cathedral, a public marker of social standing rather than a glimpse of personal life.
Soon after, Alice moved into Claremont, newly built in 1888. For more than a decade, she lived there during the house’s most active years, raising three children and anchoring the domestic and social life of one of South Canterbury’s grandest rural homes. Like many women managing large households of the time, she did not do this alone. During my visit, the current owner showed me the room where the nanny lived, a quiet reminder that Alice relied on other women’s labour to help hold daily life together. Her name has not survived in the written record, but her presence remains held within the walls of the house itself.
Alice’s role was substantial, even if largely undocumented. She managed staff, oversaw hospitality, and maintained the rhythms of a household that was both a private home and a social centre. While newspapers recorded George’s public positions and achievements, Alice’s work remained invisible, as was typical for women of her class and era.
Around 1901, Alice travelled to Britain with her family so their children could be educated there. After George’s death in 1914, she returned to Canterbury and later lived at Culverden. She died in 1938, outliving both her husband and the Rhodes family’s years at Claremont by more than two decades.
What stands out is not what history recorded about Alice, but what it did not. There is no easily traced obituary, no long list of public achievements. And yet, she lived through the years that defined Claremont as a home, a place of hospitality, and a marker of confidence in South Canterbury’s future. Her legacy, and that of the unnamed nanny who lived alongside her, sits quietly in the life of the house itself.
The Timaru Herald published a list of their wedding gifts in 1887. Elizabeth was widowed when George Rhodes died in 1864. She remarried to Arthur Perry and together, gifted them silver entree dishes for their wedding. I wonder if they were used for dinner in the dining room. Elizabeth moved from the Levels after Georges death to Linwood (which is now the site of the Timaru District Council) until 1873 when with Arthur purchased Beverley from Henry Le Cren. Henry moved with his family to London, and later returned moving into Shand House before it was used for Craighead School. The Beverly was a very large house on 8 hectares of land at the junction of Wai-iti Rd and the Great North Road. 1864-1898 George Knowles was the head gardener for the Beverly Estate. Elizabeth died 1898. The Beverley homestead was sold to the Turnbull Bros. and the land subdivided. 1951 Beverley House used as a veterans home post World War Two. 1974 the grand old Beverley House is demolished.
Purau, on Banks Peninsula, was occupied by the Rhodes family in the early 1860s and became home to George Rhodes (1816–1864) and his wife Elizabeth, while George managed the family’s wider Canterbury pastoral interests during his brother Robert Heaton Rhodes’ absence overseas. During this period, the family lived at Purau with their young children, including George Hampton Rhodes, who was born at The Levels in 1862 and spent part of his early childhood in this isolated coastal settlement.
Purau represents an early and precarious phase of the Rhodes story in Canterbury, shaped by coastal access, shipping connections and physically demanding farm work. It was here, in 1864, that George Rhodes died after falling seriously ill. Contemporary accounts record that he caught a chill while dipping sheep in cold water, working waist-deep in a dammed stream. The illness developed into what was described as “low fever”, and despite care and daily assistance arriving by boat from across the harbour, he died at Purau, never seeing his brother again. His death marked a profound turning point for the family.
Long before Claremont rose from the bluestone of Mount Horrible, places like Purau laid the financial, practical and cultural foundations that enabled later generations of the Rhodes family to build with confidence further inland. From this coastal foothold, the family consolidated their position at The Levels, South Canterbury’s first great sheep run, established in 1851. A generation later, the accumulated wealth, stability and social standing born of these early years found architectural expression at Claremont, built in 1888 by George Hampton Rhodes, son of George and Elizabeth, on land once part of The Levels estate.
Seen together, Purau and Claremont bookend the Rhodes experience in Canterbury: one a working frontier homestead close to the sea, marked by isolation, risk and loss; the other a refined country house overlooking land transformed by volcanic fire, pastoral success and inherited opportunity. The child who once lived at Purau would grow up to build Claremont — carrying forward a family story shaped as much by hardship as by prosperity.
The stained glass window glows over the stair well. I love imagining all the people who have gone up and down the stairs over the years.
The early twentieth century brought wider structural change. Following government purchase and subdivision of the Claremont Estate, farms were balloted in the Claremont Settlement in August 1912. At that time, the homestead block was held by H. T. Rosendale, who had purchased it from Donald Macfarlane in 1911. The era of Claremont as a private Rhodes family home was over.
A new and very different chapter began in 1932, when the Catholic Marist Brothers purchased the property for use as a residential training centre, known as St Joseph’s Novitiate. This was not a conventional school, but a boarding-style formation house, where young men lived on site while preparing for religious life and, often, future teaching roles in Catholic schools across New Zealand. Over time, the house was adapted to suit communal living. A chapel was built beside the homestead in 1955, designed in sympathy with the original building, and dormitory accommodation expanded the site’s capacity.
Marist burials at Claremont (01 Oct 1977). Aoraki Heritage Collection, accessed 17/12/2025, https://aorakiheritage.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/2465
After 1980, changing needs once again reshaped Claremont’s purpose. Its use shifted away from religious formation and later became an alcohol and drug rehabilitation centre, continuing the pattern of the house serving broader community needs. In 1999, the property was purchased by John West and converted into a boutique hotel and wedding venue. In the same year, the remains of priests who had been buried near the homestead were respectfully removed and reinterred at Temuka Cemetery.
Claremont has since passed through several hands, most recently in 2018, and is now known as Claremont Castle.
Seen as a whole, this sequence is striking. Over more than a century, Claremont has shifted repeatedly in response to changing social needs, from family home to vice-regal residence, from boarding-style religious community to place of recovery, hospitality, and gathering. The stone walls remain, but the lives within them have continually reshaped what the house was for.
Wrench for 'Brother Jock' (01 Oct 1977). Aoraki Heritage Collection, accessed 17/12/2025, https://aorakiheritage.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/2463
Side Quest: How does Blue Cliff station link to Claremont - Four women, four doorways
Blue Cliffs and Claremont are linked not by shared walls, but by shared blood, land and legacy. Blue Cliffs Station was home to Airini Woodhouse, granddaughter of Robert Heaton Rhodes, while Claremont was built in 1888 by her uncle, George Hampton Rhodes. Together they represent two expressions of the same family story — one a working pastoral estate where skills, stewardship and innovation were learned, the other a refined country house designed by Collins & Harman to express permanence and social confidence. Although Airini never lived at Claremont, she inherited the world that produced it, and through her writing and heritage work, she helped ensure that the lives shaped within houses like Claremont were not forgotten.
Once you start tracing Timaru’s early households, you realise the story isn’t held by one “important” woman at a time. It sits across different doorways, different budgets, different expectations and very different levels of freedom.
Airini Woodhouse (born Airini Elizabeth Rhodes, 1896–1989) is the easiest to spot because she left such a strong paper trail. As the only child of Robert Heaton Rhodes of Blue Cliffs and Jessie Bidwill, she grew up in a world where land, education, travel, and time were available. She learned station skills, became the first woman in New Zealand registered as an owner classer, campaigned to protect Māori rock art, chaired heritage committees, and published local histories. Her impact was public, long, and visible because she had the means, and then chose to use them.
But Airini’s story sits in sharp relief when you place her beside Ann Williams. Ann’s life in Timaru was defined by the frontier version of “making do”. In the early beach settlement years she and Sam were closely tied to the Rhodes world through work and survival, not comfort. Ann’s opportunity to build a legacy was brutally short. She died in 1860, and whatever she might have become in later years, in the town’s civic life, in business, in community work, was simply cut off. When you hold Ann up against Airini, the contrast is not character, it’s circumstance: one woman remembered because she had decades and resources, another nearly lost because she had neither.
Then there’s Alice Henrietta Thierens Rhodes (1862–1938), the first mistress of Claremont. Alice’s role is often described through the lens of the house itself, and that is telling. Claremont was built in 1888 after her marriage to George Hampton Rhodes, designed by Collins & Harman, and it became a venue for a busy social life. Alice raised three children in a home constructed from bluestone and Oamaru limestone, with the labour of staff supporting the daily running of the place. In your own visit, the current owner pointed out where the nanny lived. That detail matters, because it’s a reminder that even “family life” in a grand house was a layered ecosystem of women’s work, much of it unnamed.
Place those two women near the George Street landing place, and a third doorway opens: Elizabeth Rhodes. Elizabeth is central to Timaru’s earliest Rhodes chapter, connected to the 1851 George Street cottage that later earned recognition as the town’s first European house. The cottage sits close to the Landing Service Building, the very building the Timaru Civic Trust rescued, and today a plaque acknowledges the cottage’s significance. Whether Elizabeth lived in that cottage or moved straight to The Levels is one of those frustrating questions where the records can be thin, and it’s honest to say so. But what we can say is that Elizabeth represents the domestic and organisational backbone of an early runholding family, in a settlement where supplies were scarce and the work of maintaining a household was constant and skilled.
And then there’s Margaret Hornbrook, who belongs in this line up precisely because she brings us back down to the ordinary realities of early town life. Margaret’s story is not a “big house” story. It’s a settler family story: the grinding work of establishing a home, raising children, and keeping going in a place still being built. When you place Margaret alongside Alice and Airini, you can see the spectrum of women’s lives in the same district at roughly the same time: from labouring through uncertainty, to running a grand household supported by staff, to later shaping heritage memory with the authority that education and land ownership provided.
That’s the thing this side quest keeps teaching me. Timaru’s women weren’t a single type. They weren’t one story. They lived under wildly different pressures, and their “impact” often depended less on personality than on time, money, health, and whether their work was considered record worthy by the people writing the history.
Airini is remembered because she wrote, chaired, campaigned, and published. Ann is almost lost because her life was short, her labour was domestic, and her death left little behind except grief and silence. Alice is framed through a house, which risks hiding the human work behind the stone. Elizabeth sits at the beginning, close to the landing place and the first cottage, where survival and settlement depended on domestic capability. Margaret anchors it all in the everyday.
Four women. Four doorways. One district. And a reminder that if we only tell the stories that were easy to archive, we miss the ones that held the place together.
Airini Elizabeth Woodhouse (1896–1989), only child of Robert Heaton Rhodes and Jessie Bidwell of Blue Cliffs Station, was a Timaru farmer, community leader, historian, and author. Granddaughter of early settler George Rhodes, she contributed to numerous voluntary organisations and left a lasting legacy through her writings, copies of which are held in the Aoraki Heritage Collection.
Blue Cliffs Homestead: Historical Society Visits Blue Cliffs (Oct 1954). Aoraki Heritage Collection, accessed 26/08/2025, https://aorakiheritage.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/5123
First Timaru Show on Elizabeth Street 1866
c1890 Crowd on the beach at Caroline Bay, Timaru - Photograph taken by William Ferrier. 1890 Alexander Turnbull Library - Wellington, New Zealand - Collection PAColl-4746 Woodhouse, Airini Elizabeth 1896-1989 Photographs of Timaru
1874 Map shows the location of the Agricultural Show. Jessie's photos now in Museum archives give us a wonderful insight into our people and place of the past.
First Motor Car at the Hermitage Hotel Mt Cook 1906. Note on back of backing card reads: "From left - J S Rutherford, Opawe; R H Rhodes, Blue Cliffs. Back seat - R L Wigley." Photographer unidentified. Part of Woodhouse, Airini Elizabeth, 1896-1989: Photographs of Timaru (A library client has questioned the date of this photograph, 23-August-2007. According to him the first cars to Mount Cook were a pair of De Dion 2 seaters. He suggests that this vehicle may well be one of the first service cars to make the the trip in 1907.) Many of her photo collections have been saved into national museum archives, which are critical to helping us learn about the past and reflect with our own lens of today.
