Kinder House

This guide to Kinder House in Auckland opens on Christmas morning, eighteen sixty-five, when a newspaper headline stopped Parnell cold with news of the Kinder Tragedy: bank manager Henry Kinder found dead of a gunshot wound, his wife Maria and her lover both in the house. It follows Henry's brother, the Reverend John Kinder, an Anglican priest, schoolmaster and quietly brilliant photographer who was raising his brother's six children under this same roof built for a bishop in eighteen fifty-seven. The house was designed by Frederick Thatcher, the architect behind half of Auckland's Anglican buildings, and its grey volcanic stone still frames the double-storey Gothic lines you can see from the lawn.