The Karori house where Katherine Mansfield spent her early childhood, and where she set her famous short story The Doll's House, is for sale for the first time in more than a decade.
The homestead at 372 Karori Rd, known as Chesney Wold, was expected to sell for around $2 million. Offers close on Thursday.
Mansfield moved there with her family in 1893, aged four, and started school in Karori. At the time the house sat among paddocks on Wellington's rural fringe. Karori is now one of the city's busiest suburbs.
Katherine Mansfield House & Garden director Cherie Jacobsen said the house and its setting "played such a big role in her memories and her life".
"One of her most famous stories took place here, so The Doll's House," Jacobsen said.
"It's a really poignant story about class and that sense children have of things should be fair and equal, and that took place here, essentially, where we're standing perhaps."
The historic Karori homestead where the writer spent her early childhood is expected to fetch offers of $2m. (Source: Seven Sharp)
Farmer Stephen Lancaster, the first mayor of Karori, built the homestead in 1866. He named it Chesney Wold after the country house in Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House, and the name stuck.
The house has had several lives since the Beauchamp family left.
"Mansfield is just one chapter of this house's really incredible history," Jacobsen said.
"It's gone from being a girls' boarding school to Mexican Embassy to family home, which is quite an amazing history for one building to have."
Much of the building has changed. The current entrance way had been the side of the house in Mansfield's day, and the garden is far smaller, although the ornate ceilings survive.
Mansfield wrote about the tūī and ruru (morepork) she heard there, and described Chesney Wold as "a great old rambling house".
Jacobsen said the current owners hoped another family would buy the property "and add to the story".
"I think it's incredibly important that we have buildings like this, where someone might walk past and think, 'Oh yeah, it's just an old house'. But what is amazing about houses is the stories they contain."
Thorndon birthplace
Mansfield was born in 1888 in a house on Tinakori Rd in Thorndon, about 10 minutes' drive from Karori. Her family had moved in earlier that year.
Her story Prelude opens with the family packed up on its front lawn, ready for the move to Karori.
The Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society bought the Tinakori Rd house in 1987, restored it and turned it into a two-storey museum, now known as Katherine Mansfield House & Garden.
"It was restored back to the original 1888 layout, and we've got replica wallpapers, so they found fragments of the original wallpapers when they restored the house," Jacobsen said.
The museum holds first editions of her books and belongings of the Beauchamp family. Its staircase still has the original New Zealand timber balusters, turned to look like bamboo in line with the late-1800s fashion for Japanese and Chinese-inspired design.
The museum also runs writing workshops for children.
"When we had school groups, they've read The Doll's House story, and so they are always quite thrilled to see the doll's house and to match elements of it to its description," Jacobsen said.
Mansfield died of tuberculosis in France in 1923, aged 34.
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