News & Events

The weather was perfect on the Sunday of King's Birthday weekend for a combined training day with the guides of Riccarton House, Kate Sheppard House and Ngaio Marsh House. As part of our Her City alliance, the tables were turned on a group of guides who became tour visitors at each historic house museum in turn. Ngaio Marsh guide and Deputy Chairperson Robyn Peers briefed the group in the garden before everyone headed indoors on the last stop of a fascinating day.

With winter fast approaching the garden at the Ngaio Marsh House is starting to retire before it bursts into life again come spring. But there's one plant, right by the path up to the house, that is breaking out all over and it's a West Australian native. The pincushion plant (Hakea laurina) is known as kodjet by the Noongar people and it is a visual delight. Judging from my grandmother's garden books it was in vogue for New Zealand gardens in the 1950s and 1960s. There's som

With funding from the Roger Wait and Norah Wait Charitable Trust we have been able to install UV film on the north and west-facing windows in the house. Glen and Sam from Solar Control took great care to achieve an outcome that has been a long time in the making. Protection for the house's historic artefacts, including the beautiful dining room curtains, is a key part of the trust's mission. We are very grateful to the Wait Trust for supporting Canterbury heritage projects li

The Clocks Bookshop in Strowan's Normans Road holds the largest number of new Ngaio Marsh classic crime fiction of any bookshop in the country. Pick up one of Dame Ngaio's novels on the GBC as the perfect 'homework' before a guided tour of her former home.

In March, artist Jen Alexandra installed a series of sculptural forms throughout the house and garden as part of her doctoral research. Jen's work explores a simple but compelling question: what happens when objects made for gallery spaces are brought into somewhere as storied as the Ngaio Marsh house? "I wanted to see what happened when my work was experienced within the richly layered context of the house," she explains. Embracing the constraints of the heritage site, Jen's