Daily Photo – The Grandeur of Larnach’s Castle
In the late summer of 1870, on the Otago Peninsula in Dunedin, a grand residential building project was started: dense bush was cleared by hand and the site was leveled by blasting away the top of a hill, it would be four years before the home was liveable and another 12 until it was totally completed. It was known formally by its owner as ‘The Camp’, named after the temporary cottage that was built nearby where his family could escape to on the weekends and enjoy country life while the building work took place. Locals, along with newspapers’, dubbed it Larnach’s Castle, and the name stuck.
It was built to a scale of luxury and grandeur that made it practically peerless, across the country. At a time when a typical Dunedin villa had four to six rooms, William Larnach’s boasted 43 with a turret and battlements that sat 320 metres above sea level. At the time of construction, it was so inaccessible that specially designed and built access roads were made so ox teams could drag the materials up the steep slopes to the building site where William Larnach would oversee every decision made in the construction of his home. Larnach not only had significant input into the whole design process, everything was made to the highest quality of craftsmanship and when finished, it would culminate in a grand residence that was as technically advanced as it was sublime.
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