Private art hidden off a public street

A few months ago I visited the amazing Ravenscar House Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand. I was so glad some friends recommended this little gem of a building to me, as it was amazing on all fronts.

Despite the drizzly Christchurch weather, the Patterson Associates-designed building provided a warmth and cosiness that belied it’s grey concrete and glass form. Unlike a usual house museum, where the house comes first and the art fills the space, this museum was created as a memory and a gift, reflecting the owners original art-filled home that was destroyed in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.

So the rooms within the building have an interesting dichotomy – they are both appreciative of their (new) site context, but also partly replicate the previous home of the impressive artworks. The first gallery space, the dining room is especially impressive in this way – you enter from a grey, glass-enclosed public foyer connected to a garden and pond and framed by grey clouds, and are suddenly transported into a grand country manor space with the most incredible collection of NZ landscapes I’ve ever seen lining one whole wall. It’s nearly overwhelming, but is somehow contemplative and joyful – all the things you hope architecture can be.

There are four main gallery spaces – the aforementioned dining room, the bedroom, the lounge room and the library, housing paintings, sculptures, an amazing collection of glassware and an equally impressive collection of books. The original door to the library, a hidden operable bookshelf that would make Agatha Christie proud, was salvaged from the original earthquake-damaged house and is now located within the new library. It’s very cool.

I hadn’t really encountered the idea of a contemporary purpose-built house museum before, and this one is certainly impressive. It houses an incredible collection of artworks and it completely blows my mind that this might all have stayed hidden away in someone’s private house, as I presume it did pre-earthquake. Thanks to the generosity of the owners who have amassed this collection, it’s now available for all of us to view (albeit at a small price). I find it incredible that some collectors would have this quantity, quality, diversity and, frankly, expense of artworks within their private home, and the public might never get to share in that. You could argue art needs to be commissioned and purchased within private collections to keep the ‘industry’ sustainable, but this kind of public/private permanent exhibition shows that the public can sometimes receive the benefit of this, as well as getting a brief glimpse into a world we will probably never be able to live in. I wasn’t quite sure why the Wakefield family decided to turn their collection from private to public, but I’m very glad they did.

The Museum is an incredible piece of architecture housing an incredible collection of artworks. If you are ever in this area of Christchurch I recommend you go and visit.