Francis Petre - Personal Life

Personal Life

One of Petre's first large houses, the folly-like Cargill's Castle, was built for Edward Cargill, a local politician and later a mayor of Dunedin. It is also very likely that Petre was the supervisor of the construction of a tunnel that Cargill had driven to a private secluded beach below the castle (today known as Tunnel Beach). While designing the house, Petre fell in love with Cargill's daughter Margaret. After a difficult courtship (due to Petre's staunch Catholicism and the Cargill family's equally staunch Presbyterianism) the couple were eventually permitted to marry, the wedding taking place in the villa's principal salon shortly after its completion in 1877. The building was gutted by fire in the 1940s, and is today a preserved ruin. Petre and his wife had thirteen children; Petre himself had been the third child of sixteen.

In 1903, Petre was appointed Consular Agent for Italy in Dunedin following the death of Edward Cargill. He was a founder member of the New Zealand Institute of Architects, was elected a Fellow in 1905, and was president of the Institute in 1907–08. Unusually for a man at the peak of his profession, Petre was known as congenial and popular. He died at Dunedin, in December 1918, following 42 years of architectural practice, and was buried at the Andersons Bay Cemetery, Dunedin.

Read more about this topic:  Francis Petre

Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal and/or life:

    The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
    Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)

    There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)