Clark Cottage

Where the Clark Legacy Began

Within the grounds of Summerset at Monterey Park in Hobsonville stands Clark Cottage, one of the oldest buildings still connected to the Clark family, whose pottery works once shaped this stretch of the Waitematā Harbour. Built from the same hollow ceramic blocks the family pioneered, the cottage is an earlier, smaller expression of the building experiment that later produced the larger Clark House nearby.

Thomas Edwin Clark built the cottage around 1908, not long after marrying Margaret Morrison, and the couple first called it Love Cottage. Its hollow ceramic blocks, roughly 65 by 21 centimetres, were a technique Thomas himself pioneered. Only four buildings built this way are known to survive today, Clark House among them.

The cottage is a single storey Italianate villa with Art Nouveau touches inside, a wraparound veranda trimmed in cast iron lace, and original stained glass windows, timber archways and moulded skirting still largely intact.

Over the following century the cottage changed hands and names several times. It was subdivided not long after it was built, later altered to add a dormitory, then restored using its original bricks, and known for a time as Duke House. It became home to a motor museum and model collection in the 1980s before the surrounding land was developed into what is now Summerset at Monterey Park, whose Clark Coastal villas take their name directly from it.

Tohu Heritage documented Clark Cottage in September 2026, preserving it in photorealistic 3D and extending the same record kept of Clark House, its larger sibling a short distance away in Hobsonville.