Two-and-a-half-storeyed timber house with slate roof, on 224 Rhodes Road, west of Tai Tapu, between Governors Bay and Lake Ellesmere (Te Waihora) in Canterbury.
It was designed in a Queen Anne style by Christchurch architect Frederick Strouts (1834-1919), and built by J & W Jamieson, for Sir Robert Heaton Rhodes (1861-1956).
Rhodes was a lawyer, runholder and politician, born at Purau on Banks Peninsula.
He and his wife Jessie Cooper Clarke (1865-1929) had no children, and after his death in 1956 Otahuna was sold. The government acquired the bulk of the estate in 1957 to subdivide into farms for returned servicemen. Otahuna and its garden were sold to J.E. Boyd, who ran it as a guesthouse. It was then owned by the Christian Brothers, a teaching fellowship who used Otahuna as their national headquarters between 1961 and 1972. For a time the house was occupied by the Otahuna Christian Community, who established a therapeutic community there, before it went back into private ownership in 1975. It remains a family home today, and is now a Category 1 Historic Place.
