Fernside is a generous and luxurious five-bedroom white-weatherboard slate-roofed American Colonial Revival style house with an L-shape plan. It covers approximately 9,000 square feet or less than 1,000 square metres. There are three further bedrooms in the staff wing of the main house. Set by the Tauherenikau River on the plain below the junction of the Tararua and Rimutaka ranges Fernside was built in 1924 to replace a house destroyed by fire.
The current building is the work of the educated tastes of client, Ella, Mrs Charles Elgar and her 29-year-old architect, Heathcote Helmore.
The house is near Featherston down a tree-lined mile-long (1.6 kilometres) drive from State Highway 2 and surrounded by 12 acres of expertly maintained and landscaped gardens. The gardens have mature features much more than a century old. The associated farmland which gave it the title homestead has been under separate ownership since 1945.
Fernside is one of a small group of similar sized houses. This location let not-quite-absentee owners of remote coastal sheep stations live with easy access to the railway, main roads system and later, at the local Tauherenikau Racecourse, an airfield.
It has always been and remains a private residence. In the early 1990s before putting it up for sale an owner did offer a then rundown Fernside as an exclusive B & B lodge.
Fernside was the name of the district which is now a part of Tauherenikau. Fernside railway station, accessed from the far side of the railway line, closed in 1975.
Concept
Though built of timber —in view of the 1942 Wairarapa earthquakes, fortunately — it was conceived as a brick building and the working drawings were made on that assumption.
History
The first significant house on this farm was built on Underhill Road in the early 1870s for Henry Bunny. In 1876 it was bought by Richard John Barton (1846–1879) of White Rock Station and his wife, Pihautea-born Catherine Carne Bidwill. Catherine's father brought the first flock of sheep to the Wairarapa in 1844. We understand that . . . Wairarapa Standard 12 September 1876 Page 2 </ref> but, ill for a long time, he died in 1879. Mrs Barton remarried to G. T. F. Hutton of Ruatuna (Ruakokapatuna), Martinborough in 1881.
Mrs Elgar
Charles Elgar leased Fernside's 1,134 acres or 460 hectares from the Barton trustees about 1886. He married Ella Pharazyn in 1890, their only child was born there the following year, and he bought the property in 1888. Mrs Hutton kept the homestead with a 100-acre home farm and lived there until the autumn of 1901 and afterwards was known as Algies Farm.
Gardens
The Fernside/Longwood water race was begun in 1890 and Fernside lake is known to have existed by 1899. In the summer of 1908 -1909 there were extensive alterations to the Fernside headworks of their joint water-race scheme improving the water supply to livestock at Fernside and at Longwood. Seventeen men were employed. Shortly before Christmas 1913 members of The Wairarapa Automobile Association and friends were entertained by Martin Elgar and Mrs Izard, sister of Mrs Charles Elgar, at a garden party at Fernside. The Evening Post reported: “A large sum of money has been spent on the grounds" and how H. R. Bunny, in his speech thanking host and hostess on behalf of the club's committee, "remarked that a wilderness of fern and manuka had been transformed into a veritable paradise”
Fire
The Elgar's homestead of 20 rooms and its contents were totally destroyed by fire in November 1923. Being heavily insured the Elgars appointed Heathcote Helmore to design a new one and promptly departed overseas to buy antiques and furnishings for their new home.
Heathcote Helmore
Heathcote Helmore, one of a well-known Christchurch family, was articled to architect Cecil Wood in 1912 aged 17. Following the 1914 outbreak of war he was posted to the position of A-d-c to the current Governor-General and he remained there four years. He is assumed to have returned to Wood to finish his articles after the Armistice. He won admission to the Institute of Architects in April 1920. With a younger architect friend, Guy Cotterill, he set out to gather overseas experience. They travelled to England in July 1920 on the ship S.S. Ionic with the retiring Governor-General and when they docked in Newport News took up his offer to take them in Liverpool's car to Yorktown where the young men took a deep interest in the colonial architecture of Virginia.