Mission House


The Mission House at Kerikeri in New Zealand was completed in 1822 as part of the Kerikeri Mission Station by the Church Missionary Society, and is New Zealand’s oldest surviving building. It is sometimes known as Kemp House.
Samuel Marsden established the Anglican mission to New Zealand with lay preachers, who lived in the Bay of Islands under the protection of Hongi Hika, the chief of the local tribe, the Ngāpuhi. In November 1819, Marsden purchased 13,000 acres from the Ngapuhi.
Marsden instructed the Reverend John Butler to erect buildings for the mission station under the shelter of the Ngapuhi Pa or fortress of Kororipo at Kerikeri,. Using Māori and skilled European labour, Butler had completed the centre piece Mission House by 1822,.
Butler’s house was a weatherboard clad, two-storey Georgian design with a verandah and two chimneys. It was built primarily from Kauri. At some point in the 1830s, a skilling was added, and the verandah was replaced with an enlarged design in 1843. In the 1920s a bathroom was added behind the kitchen.
Butler was sacked in 1823, and George Clarke occupied the building until the early 1830s, by which time the Ngapuhi had abandoned Kororipo, but the mission station was strong enough to feel no need for protection.
The house was occupied by James and Charlotte Kemp in 1832 and although initially part of an expanded mission presence,, it was later purchased by the Kemps, and stayed in that family for 142 years, until Ernest Kemp donated it to the New Zealand Historic Places Trust in 1974.
Mission House was added to the New Zealand Historic Places Category 1 list on 23 June 1983.
The Trust has restored the building to an approximation of its 1843 appearance,. Together with the Stone Store, the Mission house is now a museum open to the public.
meets the Kerikeri Inlet. The old stone store bridge was located for decades where the ford can be seen, but was removed late in 2008.