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OLD SHIPPING OFFICE

Akaroa’s Old Shipping Office is one of New Zealand’s finest – and smallest – examples of an elaborately Italianate style executed in timber.

Category: Commercial Buildings
Date: 1895
Street Address: 3 Church Street
HPT registered? Yes
District Plan Listed? Yes

This building is one of the country’s best examples of two features of New Zealand commercial architecture.

 Its façade is in an elaborate Italianate style – replete with rusticated pilasters, pediments, a parapet, a shaped gable end, window hoods on brackets, a keystone over the entrance and rusticated weatherboards. But all this detailing is executed entirely in timber. It is also, despite its air of grandeur, a tiny building. The building’s scale, and the use of timber for features usually associated with construction in stone, make it quite different from the Italianate buildings of almost every other country.

The Shipping Office was built in 1895 for the Union Steam Ship Company, at a time when most goods and many people came and went by sea. Akaroa then had regular shipping links with Lyttelton, Timaru and Otago ports. The improvement of Peninsula roads led eventually to a decline in shipping services in and out of Akaroa. When the shipping company no longer needed premises in Akaroa, the building was used for other commercial purposes for a number of years.

Since the mid 1990s it has been a holiday apartment.

 

 
   
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