Set amid 6.5ha (16 acres) of sweeping lawns, established gardens and trees, with views of the Southern Alps and Aoraki (Mt Cook), Opawa Homestead provides you with the perfect setting for any occasion — be it a wedding, romantic weekend, corporate retreat or a welcoming, comfortable stay during your journey of New Zealand.
The Opawa Homestead, built in 1862 from Kauri, Rimu and other New Zealand native timbers, was once the center of a vast 13,354 ha (33,000 acre) station, and is now the oldest remaining farmhouse of its type in the Mackenzie country. The Homestead property originally comprised Runs 223 & 318 and was purchased in 1856 from the Government of the day. It was sold in 1862 and again in 1870, when the Rutherford family purchased it. Rutherford was known for both his extreme generosity and for the emus he kept in front of the property.
The Rutherford family retained the property until 1924, at which time the property was sold and extensively altered. Opawa changed hands several times since then, before passing to its present owner.
The garden was laid out by Alfred Buxton, perhaps the most significant landscape gardener in New Zealand in the first half of the twentieth century. Buxton laid out many of the finest gardens, both public and private, in Canterbury and other parts of the South Island.
In another first, Opawa Homestead is the home of ice hockey in New Zealand and local farm workers played the initial game here in 1937 for the Erewhon Cup. This, on a rink constructed with the aid of drought horses as a pond in front of the house.