The factory had belonged to the Pihama Co-operative Dairy Company, established in 1897. It burned down in 1923, was rebuilt and operated until 1956. Later it was used as a piggery, which was also gutted by fire.
When the couple discovered it the 1400m2 building was filled with rubble where it had collapsed in on itself.
“It was full of pig carcases from the fire,” Louise said.
“We buried them on the land where we grew our first crop of 1000 lavender plants. We think that’s why we got such a good yield – 12 litres of oil.”
During years of hard graft, doing a lot of the work themselves, David and Louise cleared the mess and built a comfortable home and workspaces, adding unusual creative touches.
The main entrance simulates the bed of a stream; river stones bordered by brushwood curve around into the living areas. Here they have kept the remnants of burnt cork insulation from the old curing room walls.
“When converted to a piggery the cheese curing coolroom became the farrowing room and housed the farrowing pens,” David said.
“It had heavy cork insulation on the walls and was heated for the sows. This room is now our house.”
With two levels their home covers 380m2.They found pumice, which was also used for insulation, right through the ceiling and when they opened a safe in the room they found not bonds, but the skeleton of a chook.
A central courtyard, left open to the sky where the roof fell in, was once the factory vat room. It housed vats and later a cheddarmaster, a continuous cheesemaking belt.
They put in a swimming pool when the children were young then made it into an internal garden. Earth, trees and other materials had to be craned in over the walls.
A vat room walkway links the living area with workspaces, the old boiler and coal room, and the lavender distillery, which is in the old cheese-packing room.
The separator room is now a garage – the separator would have been where a car chassis hangs, as David is a retired mechanical engineer and renovates classic cars. He worked at the Egmont Dairy Company for 10 years and when the Opunake factory closed in 1981 he joined the Fonterra Lactose Company in Kapuni where he continued work for 20 years, 15 as maintenance co-ordinator.
Their daughter Rebecca is a research scientist for Fonterra so dairy production is in the family. Louise is a primary school teacher.
In the garage/workshop are the roof trusses from the original factory, rebuilt after a fire in 1923. Bearing blocks and grease are visible on the wall where the shafts came through from a water turbine that provided power to the plant.
“There’s still an old dam up the river and part of an aqueduct that used to channel the water down,” David said.
There’s also a pet eel they call Neil. They turned the turbine room into a sizeable 150m2 semi-detached house where elderly parents and guests can stay.
In the grounds chimneys mark where workers’ cottages stood. The Knapmans lived in one for a couple of years then moved into the upstairs where they built gabled bedrooms to suit the style of the building. But shortly the building will move on to the next stage of its life with David and Louise having recently sold their home to make a major downsize into their unit at Opunake.
“We are in the midst of cleaning everything out – skip bin and bonfires,” David said in mid-January.
“We’ll both be sad to go but we want to travel and it’s a bit impossible with this big place.
“The lavender is in full bloom and ready for our last harvest.”
A piece of pioneering history
The first dairy factories in New Zealand opened in the mid-1880s in Taranaki and Waikato, with 20 factories built by 1884, making both butter and cheese by adapting to changing supply and demand.
At first they used traditional farmhouse methods, and only slowly began to use larger, steam-driven equipment.
The Knapmans have a copy of a booklet written for the Golden Jubilee of the Pihama Co-operative Dairy Company, 1897-98 to 1947-48, which records that output for the 1912-13 season was 250 tonnes of cheese, 5.5t of whey butter and 140t of creamery butter.
The main factory where the Knapmans live was built on what is now called the Surf Highway and there were three creameries at Skeet Road, Taungatara, and Waiteika Road.
The jubilee booklet also records the first imported milking machine was a Thistle, manufactured in Glasgow and installed on the farm of Mr W T West of Tariki Road in October 1896.
It required an 8hp steam engine to drive it although water power was used. In a trial the four-cow plant milked 10 cows in 12 and a half minutes and there were only two and a half pints of strippings when the machine had finished.
This is the third in a series of articles by Helen Frances about old dairying buildings put to new uses.
