Victorian villas and iron lace

Before I launch in to the topic of today's post, I'll tell you that today is Labour Day in New Zealand, a Monday holiday like the U.S. has. Labour Day was first celebrated here in 1890 and then was set in law in 1899 to commemorate the fact that New Zealand was one of the first countries to have an eight hour work day. In fact, it was the 1840s when people first began fighting for an eight hour work day.

Now my topic of the day. Dunedin has lots of old houses, and one of the most common styles is called a villa. Dave and I were trying to estimate what percentage of all the houses here are villas. Maybe a third. Maybe a quarter. Maybe 20 percent. But it's amazing number. We live in one. They were all built about a hundred years ago. They have a central hallway going straight back and typically two rooms on each side. Often the front room on the left or right is the living room. The kitchen and bathroom are mostly add-ons. In our case, there's an addition on the back of the house with bathroom, kitchen, dining room and a small family room. As far as I can tell, the original kitchens were small lean-tos on the back or side of the house. The upside of villas is their charm. The downside is the lack of insulation and the leaky old single pane windows. (When it's windy, our curtains sway in the breeze coming through the windows.) The first photo shows a typical villa.

Some villas are decorated with iron lace, like the one in the next photo.

Yesterday we were invited for tea at someone's house who lives on the other side of the university. In her neighborhood were several houses with iron lace, so we photographed them. And on the way home we drove past the area around the University, where I had scoped out quite a few villas with nice iron lace. So here's an assortment of iron lace on houses. The first four are other styles of houses, and then the next six are villas.

This last one, below, is one of the few houses I've seen with iron lace on two stories.