Tauranga resident Jennifer Blakeley-Shugg remembers her mother playing music from the drawing room in her home – named Topcroft – when she was a child.

Her father Reginald Shearman – a town clerk at the Tauranga Borough Council for 40 years – bought the house on Edgecumbe Rd in the 1920s before he married Brenda Mountfort there in 1930. He lived there with Brenda and their three children Jennifer, John and Rodney.

SunLive reporter Zoe Hunter outside the Topcroft as part of her Tauranga historic places segment.

Jennifer remembers her mother's daily routine of playing music from the drawing room.

'My mother was a concert pianist. She used to sit in the drawing room, where she would play for hours and hours every day.”

When she lived in Topcroft, Jennifer says the house was adorned with 'beautiful” wallpaper and five fire places, three of which were brought from Italy.

When her father died in 1952 – and her mother passed in 1990 – Jennifer and her brothers rented the house for about six years before the land was subdivided into about 14 sections.

Jennifer was given some land on the corner of 13^th Ave, where she has lived for 40 years. Her brothers were given land next to her plot; and by 1976, Jennifer says all sections were either sold or up for sale.

According to Jennifer and Rodney, the house was moved from Edgecumbe Rd in the late 1980s to its current location on Welcome Bay's Ranginui Rd.

Building of the house was delayed by the New Zealand Wars (known as the Land Wars), until 1870. Missionary Samuel Clarke built the home, and named it after his ancestral home, Topcroft Hall, in England.