We are heading away from politics for a little bit to solve a architectural mystery.
Part One: The House, the Man, and the Projects That Vanished
There is a drawing that should not exist. At least, not in the form it arrived in my inbox: a quiet digital file sent by an archivist who probably thought they were doing me a small favour. Instead, they handed me the start of a two week obsession.
It is a Megson.
A real one.
A full commission titled simply: House for John C. Howard.
Fourteen sheets.
Ground floor plan.
First floor plan.
Elevations.
Perspectives.
Drainage layouts.
Everything needed to build a house that never materialised on the land it was meant for.
This is the start of the mystery.
John Castlemaine Howard
Before the unfinished house, there was the man.
John Castlemaine Howard was not a small-time builder trying his luck in Taupo. He ran Howard Construction, lived in Auckland, and in the late seventies he held land in Acacia Bay. By 1981 he was listed as a motelier and orchardist. By 1982 he was facing penal tax notices. By 1983 he was bankrupt.
The timeline matters, because Megson drew his house in 1976.
And everything after that for Howard spiralled.
You can actually watch the story flip: one moment he commissions one of the most inventive architects in the country, the next he is transferring Taupo sections to other names and struggling to keep his finances upright.
The Megson house became a casualty of that collapse.
The House That Was Never Built
I have now read both property files for 919 and 921 Acacia Bay Road. Hundreds of pages. Multiple architects. Multiple consent trails. The houses that stand there today are not Megson’s work. They were designed in the 1980s and 1990s by completely different architects, long after Megson drew his 1976 plans.
They do not match the Megson geometry, the structure, the framing logic, the sequencing of spaces, or the timelines. Even with recladding, additions, or alterations, the bones tell the truth.
Howard owned the land.
Megson drew the house.
It was intended for Acacia Bay.
And it was never built.
The paper trail ends in mid-air.
The Mystery Townhouses
There is another thread attached to Howard.
It starts as a rumour and then shows up as a vague architectural reference: the Howard Construction townhouses.
They appear in files and comments, but never with an architect’s name attached. They were meant to be three. Only two were ever built. One rejects the date. One rejects the style. One almost matches Megson’s other Taupo work until you look closer and realise it is not him at all.
Someone designed them, but not Megson. The council has already sent the files, buried inside hundreds of pages. They are Acacia Bay projects, not Auckland ones, and they sit in the same timeline as his financial decline.
The puzzle is not whether Megson designed them, because he did not.
The puzzle is why they look so close to his ideas without crossing the line into his work.
The Unnamed Taupo House
Hidden in the archives is another sheet.
No address.
No date.
No owner.
Just a crisp drawing labelled simply: House in Taupo.
It has Megson’s fingerprints all over it. The geometry. The massing. The sectional relationships. The slightly outrageous playfulness that belongs only to him. It is a fully realised concept for someone who remains unnamed.
It could be a lost commission.
It could be a design for a site that was sold.
It could be a prototype Megson kept reworking.
It could be nothing more than a ghost of an idea that never left the drawing board.
But it exists.
And it raises the question that drives this whole story.
How many Megsons are still missing?
Where Part One Leaves Us
By the end of this first chapter, we know three things with absolute certainty.
One: Megson designed a full house for John Castlemaine Howard in 1976.
Two: The house was never built at 919 or 921 Acacia Bay Road.
Three: There are at least two more Taupo puzzles connected to the same era: the mystery townhouses and the unnamed Taupo design.
If this were fiction, the next step would be easy.
But this is Taupo.
This is real land, real archives, real owners and real paper trails that break and restart in all the wrong places.
So the search continues…
If you lived in Taupo during the 1970s or 1980s and remember anything about John C. Howard, Howard Construction, or a strange half finished or never finished house in Acacia Bay, I would love to hear from you. Even small details help, like who owned the land, what the site looked like, or whether any unusual architectural work ever started there. You can comment through my website or email me (email is in the about me page) directly. This is part of a bigger project to document Taupo’s missing architectural stories, and every memory helps fill in the gaps.
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