A fire at a cafe next to New Zealand's oldest surviving building is being investigated as suspicious.
By Peter de Graaf for RNZ
A café situated just metres from New Zealand's oldest surviving building has been damaged in an overnight blaze, but volunteer firefighters managed to stop the flames from spreading to 204-year-old Kemp House at Kerikeri Basin.
Police are investigating the blaze, which started in a storage shed next to Honey House Café around 11.30pm on Friday.
The shed was destroyed, one wall of the café was burned, and its water pipes and electrical cables were badly damaged.
The two-storey Honey House has the café on the ground level and offices for Heritage New Zealand upstairs
The business is next to Kemp House, which was built between 1821 and 1822 by missionaries, and was an important focus for early relationships between Māori and Pākehā.
Another heritage building, the Stone Store, which was built not much later - from 1832 to 1836 - is also next door to the cafe.
The fire had been small, and "both Kemp House and Stone Store were thankfully unaffected by the blaze", a Honey House Café spokesperson said.
Kerikeri deputy fire chief Andy Hamberger said the alarm was raised by someone who spotted smoke as he was heading to work on Friday night.
Two fire trucks from Kerikeri responded along with one each from Ōkaihau and Paihia.
Hamberger said the fire took about half an hour to bring under control, with firefighters dampening down until about 3am today.
He said it was incredibly lucky a local raised the alarm when he did, with the café just metres from Kemp House, a Category I heritage building.
Heritage New Zealand Northland spokesman John O'Hare said the entire property - including the Stone Store, Kemp House and the café - would be closed today while police and fire experts investigated.
The café was likely to be closed for the foreseeable future.
The cause had yet to be confirmed but if police found it had been deliberately lit, as was suspected, that would be "appalling" and "deeply disappointing", he said.
Despite its historic appearance, the Honey House - a former curator's cottage - was only built in 1976.
It was built on the site of a historic barn and took its name from James Kemp Jr's storage shed for beehives, which once stood nearby.
The café opened in 2012 with some of its recipes sourced from historic archives, or made with fruit grown in Kerikeri Mission Station's heritage orchard.
Kemp House was erected in 1821-22 by the London-based Church Missionary Society for the Reverend John Butler, the only ordained minister in the settlement at the time.
It was built by missionary carpenters and Māori sawyers and later became the home of the Kemp family.
Kemp House is currently wrapped in plastic, which could have made a fire even more catastrophic.
In 2023, a large stand of gum trees near the Stone Store were poisoned.
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