More than half a century after the original bronze doorknob of Wakatu Lodge was rescued from the scrap heap by a 17-year-old working on the grand old house, it has been brought home.
The 130-year-old, two-storied villa was shifted in sections to the Moutere two years ago and is slowly being restored by its owners Melissa and Simon Floyd, who lived in it with their family in Nelson before it was moved.
Updates of its restoration have prompted numerous stories of its past, especially from the time it was owned by the Nelson Hospital Board and used as a rehabilitation centre and home for elderly. But nothing quite compares with the missing doorknob and its hummingbird design that matches the hinges in the door.
Wayne Milburn was an apprentice working for a construction company back in the 1970s that was refurbishing the interior and exterior of Wakatu Lodge for the Nelson Hospital Board, and he couldn’t bear to see treasures like the doorknob chucked in the rubbish.
“They were changing the door locks and they picked all this stuff up and chucked it in the skip and I thought, ‘they can’t do that’! So, I picked it up and the painter got the other side. I just had a fascination for the way it was constructed and thought we couldn’t throw it away.”
When Wayne and his family moved to Australia in 1988, the doorknob went too, where it sat in a box until he came across it one day when he was sorting through bits and pieces. It just happened to be around the same time he saw stories of Wakatu Lodge being renovated by Melissa and Simon and he just had to get it back to its rightful door.
So, on a trip to New Zealand last week, he presented Melissa with the brass doorknob to be reunited with the front door.
Melissa also learnt that all the concrete that she jackhammered from the front of the house when it was at its Waimea Rd address in Nelson, was poured there by Wayne all those years ago.
“I wheelbarrowed concrete for the ramps,” he remembers. “And I jackhammered it out!” responds Melissa.
When asked about the restoration process of the old villa since it moved to its country setting in the Moutere, she answers with: “By crikey”.
Work has been on hold for a few months because “life gets in the way sometimes”, including a cancer journey for Simon. Melissa is starting to design the leadlight windows for the front entrance, using pieces of leadlight collected back in her days as a student in Dunedin and she continues to collect bits of Nelson history to add around the house and garden.
One of her latest finds are curved bricks from a kiln at the former Ngawhatu Hospital in Nelson, which she plans to incorporate in a garden path.
